A woman developed near-deadly sepsis after suffering from a rare form of kidney stones that have only ever been documented 12 times.
The 63-year-old from Tennessee sought medical help after she noticed blood in her urine while she was being treated for a urinary tract infection.
A CT scan revealed multiple stones around her right kidney that caused her urinary tract to become obstructed.
Though kidney stones are common, affecting one in 10 Americans, doctors found these stones were filled with gas that had formed in the urinary tract, a rare complication.
Doctors believe this occurs due to bacteria, which is also a cause of urinary tract infections. Only 12 cases have ever been reported in medical literature.
The woman underwent a lithotripsy, a procedure that uses shockwaves to break up stones, which are made of calcium crystals that form in the urinary tract, so they can pass through the urine.
But two days later, she returned to the emergency room complaining she ‘just did not feel well.’
Her doctors believe the lithotripsy caused her to go into sepsis, a life-threatening overreaction to an infection that causes the immune system to attack healthy organs and tissues.
Left untreated, sepsis can lead to tissue death, multi-organ failure, and death.
An unnamed woman in Tennessee went into sepsis after her urinary tract caused a rare form of kidney stones (stock image)
The above scans show imaging tests before and after the woman had a procedure to break up her kidney stones. The left image shows the gas-filled stones, and the right image shows they are no longer present
Doctors who treated the unnamed woman, from the University of Tennessee Medical Center-Knoxville, wrote in a medical journal she had a history of several chronic conditions.
These included diabetes and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition that causes the thyroid gland to produce too much thyroid hormone.
Both of these conditions can raise the risk of urinary tract infections.
In diabetics, high glucose in the urine can create an environment for harmful bacteria to converge.
Excess thyroid hormone production from Graves’ disease can also cause frequent urination and trouble emptying the bladder, which both raise urinary tract infection risk.
Urinary tract infections produce enzymes that make urine less acidic, and these enzymes form into kidney stones.
The woman tested positive for ‘a heavy growth’ of the bacterium Proteus mirabilis, which has been shown to cause urinary tract infections.
The doctors said this bacteria could have resulted in excess gases like carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the kidneys that then filled the kidney stones, a phenomenon so rare that there are ‘only about 12 cases being described.’
The patient went into sepsis two days after the lithotripsy broke up her kidney stones. It’s unclear how the procedure may have caused this, though it’s possible it could have been due to the bacteria still in her body.
The latest sepsis data from the CDC has shown a slight uptick in sepsis deaths in the last three months, which experts warn could be due to a lack of cohesive sepsis strategy in the US
Sepsis has been dubbed a ‘silent killer’ and is responsible for 350,000 American deaths every year or one every 90 seconds.
Only heart disease and cancer result in more deaths, killing 700,000 and 600,000 Americans, respectively.
Around the world, sepsis accounts for one in five deaths – 20 every minutes – and outnumbers cancer.
But despite how terrifyingly common the condition has become, one in three Americans has never even heard of it, the charity Sepsis Alliance 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 back to vital organs.
However, this takes blood from ‘non-vital’ areas like limbs, leading to tissue death and amputations.