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Sunday, June 16, 2013

Monitoring Population Levels of Alcohol Consumption in Pregnant Women: A Case for Using Biomarkers

 
A challenge to biochemically monitoring alcohol consumption in pregnancy is the prohibitive costs of collecting thousands of blood samples.

T
his pilot study looks at the feasibility of using residual samples to monitor chronic and acute alcohol consumption in pregnancy. Residual anomalies screening samples (n = 150, 2006/7) were tested for carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT, chronic marker) and ethyl glucuronide (EtG, acute marker).
 
Valid readings were obtained for CDT but not EtG.

These results pave the way for a larger representative study, to provide, for the first time, a national biochemical baseline estimate of chronic alcohol consumption in the pregnant population.


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