A woman kept getting drunk even though she wasn’t drinking. The fungi in his gut produced their own alcohol.
A woman ended up in the emergency room with excessive drowsiness, slurred speech and the smell of alcohol on her breath, but she had not ingested a drop of alcohol. It turns out that the microbes in her gut were making their own alcohol – and making her drunk.
Doctors eventually diagnosed him with a rare condition called auto-brewery syndrome. But before that, the fifty-year-old had been sent to the emergency room seven times in two years. Each time, her symptoms were similar and made her appear drunk. Her sleepiness, in particular, was unsettling, as she would suddenly fall asleep while getting ready for work or preparing meals. This drowsiness would prevent him from working for weeks and suppress his appetite.
During each emergency room visit, expect the last one, doctors diagnosed him with alcohol poisoning. However, “in recent years, she had completely stopped drinking due to her religious beliefs,” doctors wrote in a new report on her case, published Monday, June 3, in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association. Her family confirmed that she did not drink.
Eventually, doctors discovered that the patient’s medical history contained a clue to the cause of the drunken outbursts.
Related: Can you be intolerant to alcohol?
Before experiencing these drunken episodes, the woman had a history of recurrent urinary tract infections (UTI), which recur repeatedly and are very difficult to prevent. To treat them, he was prescribed frequent courses of antibiotics, one after the other.
The woman’s doctors suspected that in addition to clearing up her urinary infections, these high doses of antibiotics were killing off helpful bacteria in her gut. This likely paved the way for various fungi to be found in the gut. Some of these fungi can ferment carbohydrates, producing their own alcohol.
Auto-brewery syndrome occurs when such mushrooms, including Saccharomyces cerevisiaeor brewer’s yeast, and Candida albicans – grow at high enough concentrations and access enough carbohydrates through a person’s diet to intoxicate them. A few bacteria have also been linked to the syndrome. People with high blood sugar and a poor ability to break down alcohol would be more prone to this disorder, and these characteristics are partly due to genetics.
It can be difficult to get a diagnosis of auto-brewery syndrome because it is very rare. Less than 100 cases have been reported since its discovery in the late 1940s.
In the woman’s case, before being diagnosed with the illness, she was evaluated multiple times by psychiatrists in the emergency room for signs of alcohol use disorder. However, none of these assessments revealed signs of addiction. During her seventh visit to the emergency room, a doctor suggested that brewery syndrome might be a possibility and put her on antifungal medication. After being referred to a gastroenterology clinic, she was also put on a low-carb diet to deprive the mushrooms of the sugar needed for fermentation.
After her symptoms had disappeared for several months, the patient increased her carbohydrate intake and the symptoms of drunkenness returned. Again, antifungal medications and a low-carb diet eliminated the symptoms.
The patient was also given probiotics to help restore helpful bacteria to her gut, and her primary care physician was advised to give her narrow-spectrum antibiotics for UTIs. Broad-spectrum antibiotics kill many bacteria at once and can therefore have a dramatic effect on the gut microbiome. Narrow-spectrum antibiotics, on the other hand, are much more targeted and can be tailored to the bacteria that may be causing the infection.
After the patient went months without a relapse, doctors checked to see if her carbohydrate intake would increase the alcohol level in her blood. Finding this was not the case, they advised the patient to slowly increase her carbohydrate intake, while being monitored by her clinical team.
“Auto-brewery syndrome leads to significant social, legal and medical consequences for patients and their loved ones,” the doctors wrote in the report. “Our patient had several emergency room visits, was evaluated by internists and psychiatrists, and was certified under the Mental Health Act before being diagnosed with auto-brewery syndrome, reinforcing why Knowledge of this syndrome is essential for clinical diagnosis and management.”
This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to offer medical advice.
Have you ever wondered why some people build muscle more easily than others Or why do freckles appear in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works community@livescience.com with the subject line “Health Desk Q,” and you may see the answer to your question on the website!
News Source : www.livescience.com
Gn Health
