Posted: September 27, 2013
When a 61-year-old Texas man came into an emergency room claiming he was dizzy and was found to have a blood alcohol concentration of 0.37 percent, doctors assumed he was drunk.
It turned out that those medical professionals were wrong: the man had “auto-brewery syndrome.” His stomach contained so much yeast that he was making his own in-house brew, literally.
The patient’s wife — who was a nurse — was so concerned with her husband’s constantly drunk condition that she had him regularly tested with a Breathalyzer. He would record numbers as high as 0.33 to 0.4 percent, considerably higher than the U.S. legal driving limit of 0.08 percent.
“He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime,” Cordell told NPR.
After isolating the patient for 24 hours and making sure there was no alcohol or sugar available, the team continued to check his blood alcohol level. The levels were as high as 0.12 percent without any alcohol consumption.
The doctors then realized that he must have been infected with high levels Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a kind of yeast that is used in alcohol fermentation and baking. They suspected that because the patient had been put on antibiotics following surgery for a broken foot in 2004, the medications might have killed all his gut bacteria. This allowed the yeast to thrive in his body.
To cure his illness, the patient was placed on a low-carbohydrate diet and prescribed antifungal medication to get rid of the excess yeast.
His case study was published in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine earlier this summer.
Only a handful of cases have been reported in the last three decades, including a 13-year-old girl with short gut syndrome who would get drunk if she ate carbohydrates. Another 3-year-old with the same condition became drunk when she had a fruit drink high in carbohydrates.
