A woman developed near-fatal sepsis after suffering from a rare form of kidney stones that has only been documented 12 times.
The 63-year-old Tennessee woman sought medical help after noticing blood in her urine while being treated for a urinary tract infection.
A CT scan revealed multiple stones around his right kidney that caused his urinary tract to become blocked.
Although kidney stones are common, affecting one in 10 Americans, doctors discovered that these stones were filled with gas that had formed in the urinary tract, a rare complication.
Doctors believe this occurs due to bacteria, which also cause urinary tract infections. Only 12 cases have been reported in the medical literature.
The woman underwent lithotripsy, a procedure that uses shock waves to break up stones, which are made of calcium crystals that form in the urinary tract, so they can pass through urine.
But two days later, he returned to the emergency room complaining that he “just didn’t feel good.”
His doctors believe the lithotripsy caused sepsis, a life-threatening overreaction to an infection that causes the immune system to attack healthy organs and tissues.
If left untreated, sepsis can lead to tissue death, multiple organ failure, and death.
An unnamed woman in Tennessee suffered sepsis after her urinary tract caused a rare form of kidney stones (file image)
The scans above show imaging tests before and after the woman underwent a procedure to break up her kidney stones. The image on the left shows the stones filled with gas and the image on the right shows that they are no longer present.
The doctors who treated the unnamed woman, at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, wrote in a medical journal He had a history of several chronic illnesses.
These include diabetes and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disease that causes the thyroid gland to produce too much thyroid hormone.
Both conditions can increase the risk of urinary tract infections.
In diabetics, high levels of glucose in the urine can create an environment conducive to the convergence of harmful bacteria.
Excess thyroid hormone production due to Graves’ disease can also cause frequent urination and problems emptying the bladder, increasing the risk of urinary tract infection.
Urinary tract infections produce enzymes that make urine less acidic and these enzymes form kidney stones.
The woman tested positive for “an abundant growth” of the bacteria Proteus mirabilis, which has been shown to cause urinary tract infections.
Doctors said this bacteria could have caused excess gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the kidneys that then filled kidney stones, a phenomenon so rare that “only about 12 cases have been described.”
The patient went into sepsis two days after lithotripsy broke up her kidney stones. It is unclear how the procedure may have caused this, although it may have been due to bacteria still in his body.
The latest sepsis data from the CDC has shown a slight increase in sepsis deaths over the past three months, which experts warn could be due to a lack of a coherent sepsis strategy in the US.
Sepsis has been called a “silent killer” and is responsible for 350,000 deaths in the United States each year or one every 90 seconds.
Only heart disease and cancer cause more deaths, killing 700,000 and 600,000 Americans, respectively.
Worldwide, sepsis accounts for one in five deaths (20 every minute) and outnumbers cancer.
But despite how terrifyingly common the condition has become, one in three Americans have never heard of it, the charity Sepsis Alliance has found.
The woman’s prognosis and treatment are unclear, but sepsis is usually treated with antibiotics for the underlying infection and medications called vasopressors, which divert blood flow to vital organs.
However, this takes blood from “non-vital” areas such as the extremities, leading to tissue death and amputations.