Postmortem urinary alcohol is unreliable in diabetes

BMJ 1998;317:206 ( 18 July )

Letters

Postmortem urinary alcohol is unreliable in diabetes

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EDITOR $---$ Pounder's editorial states that raised blood alcohol concentrations at postmortem examination may be misleading andshould be corroborated by analysis of other body fluids such asvitreous humour or bladder urine.¹ I would like to issue aword of caution regarding urinary alcohol analysis in people withdiabetes (or, I suppose, glycosuria from other causes). We analysedurine in people with newly diagnosed diabetes who had symptomsof genital candidiasis as well as glycosuria and found that urinespecimens could spontaneously generate considerable quantitiesof ethanol.² We concluded that urinary alcohol could not be relied on to reflect ethanol intake in these people.

Diagnosed non-insulin dependent diabetes is common, and there are perhaps as many people again walking around with the condition undiagnosed. Because the disease carries a high mortality, particularly from cardiovascular causes, some people with the condition maybe found inexplicably dead and the subject of . . . [Full text of this article]