Abstract
Alcohol is one of the main causes of liver diseases such as fatty liver, alcoholic hepatitis, and chronic hepatitis with liver fibrosis or cirrhosis. To reproduce the conditions of alcohol-induced liver diseases and to identify the disease-causing mechanisms at the cellular level, several methods have been used to expose the cells to ethanol. As ethanol evaporates easily, it is difficult to mimic chronic alcohol exposure conditions at the cellular level. In this study, we developed a glass capillary system containing ethanol, which could steadily release ethanol from the polyethylene tubing and hydrogel portion at both sides of the capillary. The ethanol-containing capillary could release ethanol in the cell culture medium for up to 144 h, and the concentration of ethanol in the cell culture medium could be adjusted by controlling the number of capillaries. A long-term exposure to ethanol by the capillary system led to an increased toxicity of cells and altered the cellular physiologies, such as increasing the lipid accumulation and hepatic transaminase release in cells, as compared to the traditional direct ethanol addition method. Ethanol capillaries showed different gene expression patterns of lipid accumulation- or chronic alcoholism-related genes. Our results suggest that our ethanol-containing capillary system can be used as a valuable tool for studying the mechanism of chronic alcohol-mediated hepatic diseases at the cellular level.
Highlights
Alcohol consumption can have beneficial social and psychological effects
Since direct ethanol exposure and ethanol capillary systems show different cellular physiologies, we examined the expression of several genes that were identified as key biomarkers for alcohol-related hepatocellular carcinoma [38,39]
The TNF and MCP1 mRNA expression levels were significantly increased by the treatment with ethanol-filled capillaries for 120 h (Figure 4E). These results suggest that a long-term exposure of ethanol to cells by the ethanol capillary system induces dissimilar cellular physiologies with substantially different gene expression patterns relative to acute ethanol exposure
Summary
Alcohol consumption can have beneficial social and psychological effects. Habitual abuse of alcohol causes various mental and physical illnesses in individuals. In 2019, 25.8% of the adults in the United States participated in binge drinking, and during the past month, 6.3% of the adults were involved in heavy drinking [1]. The number of annual alcohol-related deaths in the United States was 95,000, of which 68,000 were males and 27,000 were females [2,3]. Alcohol abuse leads to significant social and economic losses, and acute and chronic alcohol dependence causes serious health problems. According to the International Classification of Disease-10, alcohol abuse causes 25 diseases, majorly diabetes, cancer, neuropsychiatric conditions, and cardiovascular diseases [4]
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