A 50-year-old man from Pennsylvania has been drinking a half-pint of vodka every day for the past 15 years. But when he began vomiting blood, he went to the emergency room.
He had complained of abdominal pain and “foul-smelling diarrhea” that had been plaguing him for two months, according to a report on his case that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. He was diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis, which is most often caused by alcoholism and means his pancreas was inflamed. In this case, a CT scan found “extensive calcification of the pancreas,” according to the doctors who treated him.
According to Live Science, alcohol spurs pancreatic cells to produce enzymes that destroy and inflame tissue there. The calcium found in your body — even if the level is within a normal range — can accumulate in places where tissue damage has occurred.
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