A woman's unusual vomiting episodes may be linked to an autoimmune disorder. A young woman experienced spontaneous vomiting attacks during which she would sometimes retch more than 30 times a day and heave up to 1.6 gallons (6 liters) over the full course of an episode. It turns out, the symptoms likely stem from an underlying autoimmune disorder. According to a report of the case, published Nov. 10 in the journal Frontiers in Endocrinology (opens in new tab), the 27-year-old woman also has type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks cells in the pancreas that produce the hormone insulin. Insulin helps shepherd sugar out of the bloodstream and into cells, but the disease reduces the body's supply of the hormone, which causes blood sugar, or glucose, levels to rise. About 1 in 5 people with type 1 diabetes have an additional autoimmune disorder of some kind, according to a 2020 report in the journal Diabetes Care (opens in new tab). In the woman's case, such an autoimmune disorder seems to drive her vomiting episodes, although her doctors are still working out how. The doctors first examined the patient in 2016, when she began experiencing vomiting episodes about once a month. Before each, the patient felt an "impending sense of doom and came to our hospital for help in a state of panic," the authors wrote. The patient would then develop nausea, excruciating abdominal pain and vomiting. "The episodes were so severe that the patient had vomiting episodes more than 30 times a day and the vomiting volume could be as large as 6 liters [1.6 gallons]." Source
