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Alcohol biomarkers play a significant role in the early diagnosis of alcohol intoxication/abuse, alcohol-related or-gan damages, assessment of alcoholism therapy outcomes, and in forensic medicine. Laboratory detection of ex-cessive alcohol consumption can be carried out by direct measuring of the ethanol and/or metabolites in biological samples which is of particular importance in the cases of acute ethanol intoxication/controlling and/or monitoring of alcohol consumption, or indirectly, by using biomarkers. Preferred diagnostic characteristics of alcohol bio-markers, specificity and sensitivity dependent on the particular demands such as: prevention and treatment of al-coholism in primary and social care, criminal justice, workplace health and safety screening, trafficking control, etc.
Alcohol biomarkers traditionally used in clinical practice [blood alcohol concentration (BAC), gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT), the ratio GGT/CDT, alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), the ratio AST/ALT, mean corpuscular volume (MCV), phosphatidyl-ethanol (PEth)] are well validated. They are used as screening/monitoring markers of acute/chronic excessive al-cohol intake, alcoholism in pregnancy, and other disorders/conditions related to alcohol abuse. Numerous poten-tial alcohol biomarkers have been discovered, but few are validated. Potential alcohol biomarkers (ethanol and se-rotonin metabolites, sialic acids, etc.) have good diagnostic characteristics, but their application in clinical practice is limited due to the costly equipment necessary for their measurement. Significant progress has been made in the development of sensitive and practical alcohol transdermal devices that can instantly/continuously measure BAC through human skin. Transdermal sensing of alcohol may become a valuable method for monitoring abstinence.
A special aspect of alcoholism is genetic predisposition to alcohol abuse and alcoholism, or alcohol-related organ damage. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have proposed several susceptibility loci for alcohol dependence.
DOI: 10.7754/Clin.Lab.2012.120318
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