Abstract
BackgroundCarbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is a widely used alcohol biomarker. Because of the high prevalence of chronic alcohol abuse in many countries, CDT plays an important role in the areas of traffic, clinical, and forensic medicine. However, CDT levels have not been determined in the Han Chinese population. Therefore, we investigated the frequency of genetic transferrin variants and the relationship between CDT levels and alcohol consumption in this population. From this data, we established a CDT cut-off for Han Chinese and evaluated the analytical performance of the CDT capillary zone electrophoresis system.ResultsThe prevalence of transferrin variants was 4.14%. The mean CDT level of the reference group was 0.73%. We recommended CDT level >1.5% as cut off standard of alcohol intake to ensuring the specificity was best. The CDT test total precision for 0.5%, 0.7%, and 1.55% was 14.4%, 11.5%, and 7.2%, respectively. The data showed good linearity in the studied range of 0.6% to 8.2%.ConclusionsThese results demonstrate that CDT is a useful marker to detect heavy daily alcohol consumption. We proposed and evaluated the first CDT cut-off for the Han Chinese population, and we showed that the CDT capillary zone electrophoresis system is a reliable analytic method.
Highlights
Carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is a widely used alcohol biomarker
Genetic variants of transferrin Among our original 797 subjects, 33 individuals (4.14%) had genetic variants of transferrin (B or D variants). These variants were detected by capillary electrophoresis, but this method cannot identify the exact type of B or D variant
These differences may be due to the measurement systems and target subjects (Western vs. Asian populations)
Summary
Carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is a widely used alcohol biomarker. Because of the high prevalence of chronic alcohol abuse in many countries, CDT plays an important role in the areas of traffic, clinical, and forensic medicine. We investigated the frequency of genetic transferrin variants and the relationship between CDT levels and alcohol consumption in this population. From this data, we established a CDT cut-off for Han Chinese and evaluated the analytical performance of the CDT capillary zone electrophoresis system. The traditional biomarkers of alcohol abuse, such as gamma glutamyl transferase (GGT), mean corpuscular volume (MCV), alanine transaminase (ALT) and aspartate transaminase (AST), have variable and limited sensitivity and specificity [1]. More attention has been paid to new alcohol markers, especially carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT)
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