One night, the police pulled over a man on suspicion of drunk driving. When he told the police that he hasn’t been drinking – no one believed him.
We can’t blame the police because it’s one of the most common alibis of people who are getting pulled over due to drunk driving. The man who was in his late 40’s then refused to take a breathalyzer test so they had to take him to the hospital to have him checked.
To his surprised, his blood alcohol level was 0.2% – definitely more than the legal limit. In fact, it shows that his results were equivalent to drinking 10 alcoholic drinks in just one hour!
Three years after the said incident, the man’s aunt bought a breathalyzer so that they can record his alcohol levels. The reason for their experiment is that she had heard about a case similar to the one that his nephew has been claiming. From there, he urged his nephew to seek professional treatment there too.
As it turns out, this man was telling the truth!
The researchers at the Richmond University Medical Center in New York discovered a shocking discovery. This man whose named wasn’t disclosed suffers from a rare disorder. He wasn’t drunk from alcohol, he was telling the truth. Instead, his gut was fermenting the carbohydrates that he was eating and ultimately converting it to alcohol!
His body was brewing beer and this condition is called Auto-brewery Syndrome or gut fermentation.
What is Auto-brewery Syndrome (Gut Fermentation)?
According to BMJ Open Gastroenterology, auto-brewery syndrome (ABS) or also known as gut fermentation syndrome, is a very rare medical condition where the carbohydrates that the patient eats results into alcohol production.
With this man’s case, he had fungal yeast that formed in the upper small bowel and cecum. These yeasts were responsible in fermenting the ingested carbohydrates to alcohol.
“These patients have the exact same implications of alcoholism: the smell, the breath, drowsiness, gait changes,”
said Fahad Malik to CNN, the study’s chief internal medicine resident at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
While his basic lab tests turned out normal aside from the alcohol results, doctors found two strains of yeast in his stools, one of which was Saccharomyces cerevisia. This yeast is commonly found and used in beer brewing, winemaking, and baking. Along with it, they also found another fungus.
“They will present as someone who’s intoxicated by alcohol, but the only difference here is that these patients can be treated by antifungal medications,” Malik continued to share to CNN.
After trying some carbohydrate-free diet, he seemed to have gotten better only to find out that his symptoms started again and at one time became severe that he fell and had bleeding in his brain.
After recovering, the man decided that it’s time to seek help from an online support group and from there; he was able to get in touch with the researchers at the Richmond University Medical Center.
They said that it seemed that the antibiotics he took years ago for his injured thumb altered his gut microbiome and allowed the fungi to grow in his gastrointestinal tract thus causing the rare syndrome.
They tested anti-fungal therapies and probiotics to help his gut bacteria normalize and it seems to be working.
“Approximately 1.5 years later, he remains asymptomatic and has resumed his previous lifestyle, including eating a normal diet while still checking his breath alcohol levels sporadically,” said the authors in the research.
Malik said that this condition is rarely diagnosed, in fact, it was even regarded as a myth before.
They aim to share this information so that people can note the early signs of gut fermentation syndrome such as mood changes, brain fog, and for some, alcohol inebriation.
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