The story of the woman who vomited 30 times a day baffled scientists

A young woman who suffered from spontaneous vomiting more than 30 times a day, and vomited up to 6 liters of gastric substancesit baffled the doctors

According to a case report published Nov. 10 in the journal Frontiers in Endocrinology, the 27-year-old woman also has type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks cells in the pancreas that produce the hormone insulin.

Insulin helps move sugar from the bloodstream into cells, but the disease reduces the supply of the hormone, causing blood sugar or glucose levels to rise.

About 1 in 5 people with type 1 diabetes have some type of additional autoimmune disorder, according to a 2020 report published in the journal Diabetes Care.

In the case of the woman, this autoimmune disease appears to be the cause of her vomiting episodesthough her doctors are still trying to figure out how.

The story of the woman who wouldn’t stop throwing up

Doctors first examined the patient in 2016, when she began experiencing bouts of vomiting about once a month.

Before each, the patient had a “sense of impending doom and came to our hospital for help in a panic,” the authors write.

Next, the patient had nausea, excruciating abdominal pain, and vomiting. “The episodes were so severe that the patient vomited more than 30 times a day and the volume of vomiting could reach 6 liters [1,6 galones]”.

Based on the patient’s pattern of episodes, the team diagnosed ‘cyclic vomiting syndrome’ (CVS), a disorder characterized by sudden bouts of vomiting interspersed with long periods without symptoms.

Its exact cause is unknown, but researchers believe it may be due to faulty nerve signals between the brain and digestive tract.to dysfunctional hormonal responses to stress or certain genetic mutations, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

After hospitalization, the patient’s symptoms usually subsided for several days, but then her blood sugar would plummet and stay low for days, even though her insulin treatment was tightly controlled.

To unravel this complex case, the medical team conducted a full body examination, “but nothing significant was found,” said Dr. Wei Liang, a doctor in the endocrinology department of Hong Kong-Shenzhen University Hospital. .

However, a blood test of the patient revealed “extremely high” levels of GAD autoantibodies, which are immune molecules that inadvertently attack body tissues and are found in patients with type 1 diabetesShe said.