Drunk Bladders Can Burst

A new risk of binge drinking - a burst bladder - is becoming increasingly common among women, according to a report in the British Medical Journal, printed here on the BBC website.

This adverse side effect of drinking was previously only being reported in men.

Apparently, a bladder can burst if it is overly full - if you're wasted, you don't realize that you need to pee, so you keep consuming alcohol and then BANG, your bladder pops, and you have to have surgery to sew it back together.

Physicians once thought only men could have a burst bladder because since they have a longer urethra than women, they need more pressure to get the urine out of the bladder. Which, I guess means, that it is easier for men to not realize that they need to go. (They thought women would simply "leak").

But, now that women are coming into hospitals with burst bladders, that reasoning has been discarded.

I should point out that you don't actually feel a BANG, you just get an intense lower abdominal pain. This symptom is synonymous with appendicitis and urinary tract infections, so it is commonly misdiagnosed.

Therefore, the message of this little report is that you need to keep peeing if you're going to drink large amounts of liquid (alcohol). And also maybe that if you're so drunk that you don't know when you need to pee, it might be time to scale back.