An American woman who had been removed from liver transplant waiting lists for trying to conceal an alcohol addiction recently became the first to be diagnosed with urinary auto-brewery syndrome, with alcohol being produced naturally in her bladder.
When the 61-year-old unnamed woman showed up on the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s liver transplant waiting list, she had already been kicked off other transplant lists for her alleged drinking problem several times, and it looked like the same was going to happen this time around. Multiple urine tests showed that there was ethanol in her urine, but the patient kept denying that she had a drinking problem. Right when they were about dismiss the woman once again, a deeper investigation showed that her urine had no ethyl glucuronide or ethyl sulfate – the metabolites of ethanol – which was weird for a person who had consumed alcohol.
