The bizarre case of a woman who pees alcohol

Clinicians encountered a case of previously unrecognized auto-brewery syndrome in which a substantial amount of alcohol was produced by yeast fermenting sugar in a patient’s urinary system, even though the patient had not consumed alcohol. This is similar to but distinct from the traditional auto-brewery syndrome, that the clinicians propose calling ‘urinary auto-brewery syndrome’ or ‘bladder fermentation syndrome.” A brief case report is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
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The hunt for a coronavirus cure is showing how science can change for the better

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently declared an international public health emergency over the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus. One day later, the Wellcome Trust research charity called for researchers, journals and funders around the world to share research data and findings relevant to the coronavirus rapidly and openly, to inform the public and help save lives.
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Managing pain in the age of opioids

The data supporting the use of opioids to treat chronic, non-cancer pain is quite weak, says Michael Ashburn, director of the Penn Pain Medicine Center at the Perelman School of Medicine. As few as one in five patients may have clinically meaningful pain relief six months after being placed on opioids, and the average pain relief that people experience if they do respond is 30-40%.
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Breakthrough cochlear device could enable hearing-impaired people to detect pitch

Many may have seen the popular videos of awestruck babies who had been born profoundly deaf hearing a parent say “I love you” for the first time. These moving moments were made possible by surgically placed cochlear implants. Thanks to the devices—which have been in use since the 1980s—nearly a million people around the world have had the experience of hearing a loved one’s voice for the first time or after a period of severe auditory loss. Nevertheless, cochlear implants have some serious limitations.
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