Carbohydrate deficient transferrin and alcoholism

Abstract

Alcohol abuse is an important public health problem, with major implications in patients with a preexisting liver pathology of viral origin. Hepatitis C, for example, is one of the diseases in which alcohol consumption can lead to the transition from a fairly benign outline to a potentially life-threatening liver disease.Alcohol abuse is usually identified on the basis of clinical judgment, alcoholism related questionnaires, laboratory tests and, more recently, biomarkers. Also on this list of tests, carbohydrate deficient transferrin (CDT) is widely available and useful for determining recent alcohol consumption, particularly when corroborated with elevation of other liver-associated enzymes. Clinicians should be aware of the indications and limitations of this test in order to better evaluate alcohol consumption in their patients.

Automated analysis of large-scale NMR data generates metabolomic signatures and links them to candidate metabolites

“…Performing the pseudo-quantification of EtG using either a peak set of 6 reference positions extracted from (Nicholas et al 2006) , or a subset of 3 features from module #240 resulted in a correlation with CDT levels of 0.36 [0.30, 0.42] for the former and 0.46 [0.40, 0.51], for the latter (Table 1). This indicates that EtG correlates better with CDT than ethanol, which is in agreement with the fact that EtG is detectable for a longer time window (2-5 days) than ethanol (12-24 hours) in urine, and CDT is a marker for heavy alcohol use (at least five drinks a day over a period of two weeks before giving the sample (Solomons 2012) ). Remarkably, the pseudo-quantification facilitated by the three features of module #240 correlates even more strongly with CDT than the full set of EtG reference features, presumably because these features have the best signal to noise ratio and optimal position for our data.…”

Milk-borne infections. An analysis of their potential effect on the milk industry

“…Other fungal species such as Nocardia brasiliensis, Candida tropicalis, 35 Candida albicans 36 or Candida krusei 37 have also been shown to cause bovine mastitis and therefore can be transmitted to humans through incorrectly processed milk, posing a threat of fungal infection 38 particularly in immunodepressed patients (for example in case of diabetes, 39 HIV-positive patients with decreased CD4 count, [40][41][42][43][44] patients with cirrhosis 45 or with chronic alcohol consumption). 46…”

Giantin Is Required for Post-Alcohol Recovery of Golgi in Liver Cells

“…Also, recently we and others found that giantin represents a Golgi docking site for different Golgi resident proteins [15,24,25,26], and EtOH-induced alteration of giantin dimerization results in impaired Golgi targeting of mannosyl (α-1,3)-glycoprotein beta-1,2- N -acetylglucosaminyltransferase (MGAT1), the key enzyme of N -glycosylation [22]. This, in turn, causes abnormal glycosylation of ASGP-R and could be a potential reason for the release of carbohydrate-deficient transferrin, the widely available test for determining recent alcohol consumption [27]. Overall, alcohol-induced Golgi fragmentation has a significant impact on protein homeostasis in hepatocytes and could play a crucial role in the development of alcoholic liver disease (ALD), which remains a major cause of liver-related mortality in the US and worldwide [28].…”