A new discovery amazes doctors from Pittsburgh. The first case of a person who, from an unusual medical condition, urinates alcohol that is made in her bladder due to yeast fermentation has just been confirmed.
The condition, which the researchers are calling Bladder Fermentation Syndrome or Urinary Self-Brewery Syndrome, is similar to another equally strange condition, the auto-brewery syndrome, where a person simply by eating carbohydrates you can get drunk, without consuming alcohol.
The case was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and explains that the 61-year-old Pittsburgh woman visited the Presbyterian Hospital from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to be placed on a liver transplant waiting list, and doctors previously suspected that her problems were due to alcohol addiction, because repeated urine tests would detect test positive for alcohol consumption.
According to the Hospital report:
“Initially, our encounters were similar, leading our clinicians to believe that she was hiding an alcohol use disorder,” her doctors rationalized in the case report.
“However, we noted that plasma test results for ethanol and urine test results for ethyl glucuronide and ethyl sulfate, which are the metabolites of ethanol, were negative, whereas urine test results for ethanol were positive.”
The patient refused to consume alcohol systematically and did not appear to show signs of intoxication during her visit to the clinic, even though her urine showed high levels of ethanol content. The doctors were also surprised when they discovered large amounts of glucose in her urine, a condition called hyperglycosuria, with abundant levels of incipient yeast observed in urine samples.
The doctors said:
“These findings led us to test whether yeast colonising in the bladder could ferment sugar to produce ethanol,” the researchers wrote “We concluded that the discrepant test results were best explained by yeast fermenting sugar in the bladder,” the authors described.
The yeast inside the patient was identified as Candida glabrata, a type of natural yeast that is found in the body and is related to brewer’s yeast, but that is not normally discovered in such abundance.
Unfortunately, efforts to eliminate yeast with antifungal treatments failed, perhaps due to the patient’s poorly controlled diabetes. In light of the woman’s apparently unique situation, doctors say she was reconsidered for a liver transplant, although the report does not make clear what was the final decision.
It is entirely conceivable that more cases have presented themselves previously without doctors knowing, given the unusual nature and complexity of this diagnosis.
