A rare case of cumulative methanol poisoning caused vision loss after 14 days

Abstract

The following case report discusses a person who experienced vision loss after consuming homemade alcoholic beverage for 14 days. A 32-year-old Iranian man with chief complaint of blindness was referred to Loghman-e Hakim hospital. His visual acuity was light perception (LP) and could only describe where the light was coming from. The patient had the history of buying 20-liter homemade alcoholic beverage. He drank it during 14 days with different groups of his friends. The day after he finished the beverage and stopped drinking his vision decreased up to the time which at the end of day 2 he was almost blind. None of his other friends that drank from the same alcohol were showing any visual or other symptoms of methanol poisoning problems. The purchased liquor had a slight amount of methanol that was detoxified by folinic acid in his fellows but accumulated during 2 weeks of constant drinking in patient and due to ethanol being a competitive inhibitor of methanol to alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzyme it didn’t convert to formic acid causing blindness. But by the time his blood ethanol levels became lower he showed symptoms of methanol toxicity.

Keywords

• ethanol
• methanol
• toxicity handmade alcohol
• vision loss