A 61-year old man from Texas came into an emergency room claiming he was dizzy and was found to have blood concentration of 0.37 percent, doctors assumed he was drunk, according to CBS News.
Despite the fact the man claimed he hadn't consumed alcohol that day, most doctors still thought he was a "closet drinker," NPR reported. 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.
Before he was diagnosed with the syndrome, 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.
Barbara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas, and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, Texas, decided to figure out what was really going on. "He would get drunk out of the blue -- on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," Cordell told NP.
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.
