From a male patient with cold allergy to a 38-year-old who has three kidneys, a number of controversial and strange medical cases caught the attention of many in 2020.
The said case reports featured in Live Science, describing the conditions of individual patients, do not typically have the type of insinuations that are observed in laborious scientific research involving thousands of participants.
Nonetheless, such rare conditions can, at times, help doctors understand further such infrequent health-related occurrences.
They also help detect unusual indications of common health conditions. Below are 3 of the oddest medical cases reported in Live Science in 2020.
1. Cold allergy
In a case report published on October 27 in The Journal of Emergency Medicine, a "34-year-old old man collapsed" after stepping out of a hot shower into a cold bathroom.
He experienced a life-threatening allergic reaction in his entire body. Such an allergy is called "anaphylaxis." The man's doctors diagnosed him with "cold urticarial," the skin's allergic reaction following exposure to cold temperatures which include cold water and air.
The patient was treated with steroids and an antihistamine from which he experienced improvement with his condition. He was given a prescription, specifically an epinephrine auto-injector, an effective treatment for anaphylaxis during emergency situations.
2. Bladder Brewery
In this case, the bladder of a woman, the same report specified, "turned into a brewery of sorts when it" began to ferment sugar into alcohol.
The 61-year-old female patient was said to need a liver transplant due to her cirrhosis, "or scarring of the liver."
However, the doctors got puzzled after her urine repeatedly got positive results from alcohol tests, even though she said she was not drinking alcoholic beverages. This report came out in February in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal.
Following several careful investigations, doctors found out that bacteria in the bladder of the woman were fermenting sugar into alcohol.
This particular condition, the case report indicated, is similar to a rare disease, also known as ABS or auto-brewery syndrome, in which bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract are converting carbohydrates into alcohol.
Those with ABS can get drunk just from the consumption of carbs. However, in this particular case, fermentation took place in the woman's bladder, making her condition different from ABS.
This particular condition was very rare that it did not have a specific name yet. The woman's doctors, the case report said, proposed calling it "urinary auto-brewery syndrome" or "bladder fermentation syndrome.
3. Three kidneys
A man from Brazil surprised his doctors after a scan showed he got not just two but three kidneys, which is a very rare condition.
This 38-year-old man originally sought care for his severe back pain. This was reported in May in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Specifically, a CT scan showed that the patient's back pain as a result of a slipped disc, a relatively common illness in which a cushion-like disk's part between the spinal vertebrate is moving out of place.
However, the doctors could not help but notice that the man had an extraordinary anatomical feature. Rather than having the usual pair of kidneys seen in an ordinary human, this man had three: an ordinary-looking one on his left side and "two fused kidneys" found close to the pelvis.
According to the case report, having three kidneys is rare, with less than a hundred reported cases in the history of medicine.
Such a condition is believed to occur during embryonic development, when a structure that usually forms one kidney splits in two.
There was no need for any medical attention for this male patient for that extra kidney. However, he was indeed given oral painkiller for his back pain.
Check out more news and information on Medicine and Health in Science Times.
