15 pints a day led to a permanent pacemaker

A 68-year-old patient in Malta whose relatives said that he had consumed 15 pints of beer every day for months, has been forced to fit a pacemaker after his drinking caused ‘irreversible’ damage to his heart, international news reports read.

The damage to the heart was diagnosed as being caused by low levels of sodium, which led to an atrioventricular block – which then leads to a low heart rate, the Daily Mail reports. The deadly condition is most commonly sparked when a person drinks copious amounts of beer and eats little food, leading to extremely low sodium levels.

This leads to insufficient amounts of solutes and difficulty urinating out the beer, where the excess fluid has been known to damage cells. Other side-effects include hyponatremia, which is abnormally low levels of sodium – a mineral which is essential to the proper functioning of the human anatomy.

Doctors at Mater Dei Hospital had already admitted this individual to hospital the previous month, where the doctors found no problems with regards to his heart rate. Although, doctors said he had been skipping meals and had bouts of vomiting, the Daily Mail read.

During his most recent visit they conducted a CT scan which revealed a low heart rate caused by the atrioventricular block, a block which had never appeared previously. He was given a temporary pacemaker, and admitted to intensive care for sodium correction as his levels hovered at 98mmol/L. the news article read.

The standard sodium levels should stay between 135 and 145mmol/L.

The AV block persisted even though the doctors had managed to raise the sodium levels back up to 130mmol/L. This led to the patient undergoing a permanent pacemaker insertion.

The case was one of the first to show that Beer Potomania can cause ‘irreversible’ problems, and led to the case being published in the award-winning medical journal, BMJ Case Reports.

The team was led by Dr Simon Mifsud, who stated in the journal that the case was noteworthy due to the fact that despite correction of serum sodium concentration, the AV block persisted.

“Beer is very poor in solute content. Hence, in patients with excessive beer intake and poor solute intake, there is a low solute load presented to the kidneys and thus free water excretion is impaired leading to the dilutional hyponatraemia,” Mifsud said in the report.