A woman has become the first to be diagnosed with a condition whereby she urinates alcohol - without drinking.
Bizarre on Female First
The unnamed 61-year-old diabetic was taken off a donor list after she was told her addiction to booze meant she could not be considered for a liver transplant to fix her liver cirrhosis.
However, it was discovered that the patient had ''urinary auto-brewery syndrome'' - where a buildup of yeast in the bladder ferments sugar to produce alcohol.
Kenichi Tamama, from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre Presbyterian Hospital, said: ''The doctors were surprised and shocked.
''Initially, clinicians thought the patient was not honest about disclosing her alcohol usage. ''This alcohol thing has been haunting her.''
Medics added that there needs to be more allowances for ''discrepancies'' and ''bias'' in lab tests for abstinence.
They wrote in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine: ''Acquiring all of the data necessary to evaluate a transplant candidate is complicated because of the high stakes, time constraints, and workload of the persons acquiring the data.
''Proper processing of data is even more difficult - it is all too easy to order alcohol monitoring tests inconsistently, overlook discrepancies in the results, and allow bias to enter and persist in the decision-making process.
''Standardised guidelines for abstinence monitoring laboratory interpretation are needed.''