Is chronic feeding of low dose alcohol hepatotoxic or genotoxic?: A time course study in mice

Abstract

Chronic intake of alcohol is known to be the third most harmful risk factor for some serious diseases including cancer. Though chronic abuse of alcohol in high dose is reported to cause progressive damage and organ failure mainly affecting liver, whether the same in a low dose can produce any hepatotoxic or genotoxic effect is not precisely known. Therefore, in this study, effects of chronic feeding of low dose alcohol were critically assessed at both genotoxic and hepatotoxic levels in a mammalian model—mice. Mice were chronically fed 0.6 ml of 0.85 M ethanol daily for 7 days onward through 120 days and sacrificed at six fixation intervals, namely at 7, 15, 30, 60, 90 and 120 days. Cytogenetical endpoints like chromosome aberrations, micronuclei, mitotic index from bone marrow cells and sperm head abnormality from epididymis of males were studied and for assessment of genotoxicity and several toxicity markers like acid and alkaline phosphatases, alanine and aspartate amino transferases, lipid peroxidation, reduced glutathione, glutathione reductase, succinate dehydrogenase and catalase were analyzed for assessment of hepatotoxicity. Additionally, liver histology, lymphocyte viability and hepatic cell viability were also studied. In this study, although chronic consumption of the low dose of alcohol did not produce significant changes in parameters like histology, percentages of hepatic cell and lymphocyte viability but certain clastogenic changes were observed at longer intervals (60 day onward). Thus, overall results suggested possible generation of hepatotoxicity and oxidative stress in chronically fed low alcohol consumption group, which could also increase cancer risk.