Protein biomarkers of alcohol abuse

Abstract

Alcohol abuse can lead to a number of health and social issues. Our current inability to accurately assess long-term drinking behaviors is an important obstacle to its diagnosis and treatment. Biomarkers for chronic alcohol consumption have made a number of important advances but have yet to become highly accurate and as accepted as objective tests for other diseases. Thus, there is a crucial need for the development of more sensitive and specific markers of alcohol abuse. Recent advancements in proteomic technologies have greatly increased the potential for alcohol abuse biomarker discovery. Here, the authors review established and novel protein biomarkers for long-term alcohol consumption and the proteomic technologies that have been used in their study.

Figure 1. Alcohol biomarkers must transition from single analyte markers to multianalyte panels able to discern between ranges of alcohol drinking

Traditional unitary biomarkers can be replaced by marker panels sampling all body compartments. Most traditional unitary biomarkers represent a single anatomical compartment. A multianalyte biomarker panel could discern between diverse drinking behaviors and patterns (e.g., nondrinkers, nonabusive drinkers and excessive drinkers), versus simply differentiating between nondrinkers and excessive drinkers. A unitary marker of alcohol use and abuse may not be able to discriminate between modest drinking and abusive drinking. On the other hand, the incorporation of additional analytes permits the separation of heavy and light drinking. Indeed, with multidimensional statistical methods, we can theoretically incorporate large numbers of analytes into a biomarker panel. 5-HIAA: 5-hydroxyindole-3-acetic acid; 5-HTOL: 5-hydroxytryptophol; β-HEX: β-hexosaminidase; ALT: Alanine aminotranferease; AST: Aspartate aminotransferase; CDT: Carbohydrate-deficient transferrin; EtG: Ethyl glucuronide; FAEE: Fatty acid ethyl ester; GGT: γ-glutamyl transferase; MCV: Mean corpuscular volume; PEth: Phosphatidylethanol.