Abstract

JURADO, C.. Markers of alcohol consumption in hair samples. Cuad. med. forense [online]. 2009, n.58, pp.265-278. ISSN 1988-611X.

Alcohol is perhaps the most widely consumed licit drug in the world. Despite the wide range of health implications associated with alcohol use, its consumption continues to be socially accepted in most countries. This situation leads to a considerable demand for reliable alcohol markers to discriminate between social drinking and alcohol abuse or to verify claims of abstinence after previous harmful drinking. Despite the considerable progress, the situation is still not satisfactory, since the indirect blood or serum markers can be altered with other pathogenic situations, and the direct markers have too short a detection window in blood or urine. Using hair, the last drawback could be avoided due to the unique ability of this matrix to serve as a long-term storage of foreign substances. The objective of the present review is to demonstrate the capacity of hair to establish chronic excessive alcohol consumption. Up to now, only two ethanol metabolites, ethyl-glucuronide (EtG) and fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE) have been analyzed in hair, both of which will be here studied at length. After this review, it is possible to conclude that both markers, EtG and FAEE, allow us to discriminate between excessive drinkers, on the one hand, and social drinkers or teetotallers, on the other. Nevertheless, they never allow us to diagnose alcoholism.

Keywords : markers for excessive alcohol consumption; ethyl-glucuronide; fatty acid ethyl esters; hair analysis.

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