This Strange Fungal Condition Makes You Drunk without Drinking
Greater awareness is needed around auto-brewery syndrome, which can cause dangerous accidents and trigger social ostracism if it is not correctly diagnosed
The woman had visited various emergency departments in Toronto six times over the past two years, always complaining of the same symptoms. She’d be at home, getting ready for work or preparing meals for her family when, seemingly out of nowhere, she’d suddenly become excessively tired and groggy. Her words would start to slur, and she’d lose motor coordination, sometimes causing her to fall. Her breath would begin to smell of alcohol, and her blood alcohol level would spike. In other words, she was drunk.
But the woman had consumed no alcoholic beverages. In fact, she’d given up drinking years before because of religious beliefs. She repeatedly related to doctors that she was a teetotaler, as did her husband. Yet each time she wound up at the hospital, she was diagnosed with alcohol intoxication. On one visit, an emergency room doctor even certified her under Ontario’s Mental Health Act to be involuntarily kept at the hospital until a psychiatric assessment could take place.
The woman’s seventh visit to the emergency department finally broke this pattern. Brian Goldman, an emergency physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, actually listened to her story. Then, he did something strange: he prescribed an antifungal medication and referred her to a gastroenterologist. Goldman suspected that the woman had auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which a person’s gut ferments alcohol from carbohydrate-heavy meals and causes them to become intoxicated without ever having consumed any alcohol.
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