Lower Belt Brewery: American Bladder Produces Alcohol Due to Unique Disease

US doctors in Pennsylvania discovered a previously unknown disease that actually turned the patient's bladder into a microbrewery producing ethyl alcohol, writes Air force.

Photo: Shutterstock

The unique discovery, described on Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, was made almost by accident. A 61-year-old woman was being prepared for liver transplant surgery at the University of Pittsburgh clinic: she suffered from severe cirrhosis and advanced type XNUMX diabetes.

Both of these diseases are often found in people who abuse alcohol, so doctors were not at all surprised that the patient’s urine tests regularly gave positive results for ethanol content - although the woman herself assured doctors that she practically did not drink.

“At first, our contacts [with the patient] were the same: all the doctors came to the conclusion that she was hiding a painful addiction to alcohol,” the authors of the work write.

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Several times, according to the results of the tests, she was advised to undergo a course of treatment for alcoholism, but the patient continued to insist that on the eve she had not even touched alcohol.

One of the clinic employees noticed that, despite the high level of alcohol in the urine, the patient did not look drunk at all. He decided to conduct a more detailed study and, to his great surprise, did not find in the tests either ethyl glucuronide or ethyl sulfate - common breakdown products of alcohol. At the same time, the alcohol content itself remained high.

A blood test for alcohol also gave a negative result: the woman was telling the truth.

To myself ... a brewery?

As a result of further research, it turned out that in the patient’s bladder there is a whole breeding ground for Candida glabrata, a single-celled fungus, a close relative of brewer’s yeast. It is often found in the microflora of healthy people, but in much smaller quantities.

The woman was prescribed treatment, but it was not possible to get rid of the infection, largely due to advanced diabetes and a weakened immune system.

Doctors placed the samples of the fungus taken from the woman in a nutrient medium and made sure that it really breaks down glucose molecules with the formation of ethyl alcohol.

For the production of any alcohol, the presence of sugar, water, yeast (or another fermenting agent) and the absence of oxygen are sufficient. Under such conditions, the fermentation process begins: sugar turns into ethyl alcohol with the release of carbon dioxide.

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Due to diabetes, the woman’s body could not cope with the level of sugar in the blood, as a result of which a significant amount of glucose entered the urine. And in the absence of oxygen, the fungus that has expanded in the body immediately started the fermentation process, actually turning the patient's bladder into a brewery.

The previously unprecedented disease was called “urinary auto-brewery syndrome” or “fermentation syndrome in the bladder.”

This is the first known case of such a disease, however, several times doctors already encountered similar symptoms when an involuntary fermentation process began in the digestive system.

However, in this case, unlike the bladder, the resulting alcohol enters the bloodstream - with all the ensuing consequences in the form of mild intoxication, dizziness, and in severe cases even nausea, vomiting and loss of consciousness.

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