A woman got a UTI. Two years later, the bacteria had evolved, invaded her brain.

Ars Technica reports on a striking medical case published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. A sixty-three-year-old woman arrived at a hospital in pain, having abruptly lost vision in her right eye. Brain scans revealed inflammation in that eye along with lesions in her parietal lobe, the region that processes sensory information, and doctors suspected a brain abscess. Blood and urine tests pointed to an infection as well as kidney trouble, and a surgical biopsy of her brain revealed pus inside. As Ars Technica tells it, the bacteria traced back to a urinary tract infection two years earlier that had evolved over time to invade her brain, a case her doctors describe as an alarming look at how an infection can change within a single patient.

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