• Posted December 13, 2024

Blood Test Might Alert Doctors to Problem Drinking

Have you been boozing more often than usual?

A new blood test might be able to tell if you’re damaging your liver from too many beers, margaritas or belts of scotch, researchers report.

A blood-borne byproduct of alcohol consumption called phosphatidylethanol (PEth) can give doctors a fair idea of how much liver scarring has occurred due to drinking, as reported recently in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Blood testing for PEth would help doctors understand patients’ drinking habits better than just asking how much they've been drinking.

“This is a more direct way to measure the harm that alcohol is causing in the body than asking patients,” said senior researcher Judy Hahn, a professor in the University of California, San Francisco's (UCSF) Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine.

“We don’t ask someone how much fatty food they eat. We measure their cholesterol,” Hahn noted in a university news release. “We don’t ask people how much they think they weigh. We weigh them.”

The body produces PEth as it processes alcohol, and previous studies have shown that PEth blood concentrations accurately reflect the amount someone imbibed, researchers said in background notes.

Heavy drinking is widespread in the United States and that increased even more during the pandemic. About 24% of U.S. adults binge drink, and more than 6% are heavy drinkers, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the study, researchers pooled data from 12 previous studies conducted in the United States, Russia, Uganda and South Africa.

More than 4,600 adults participated in these studies, which included testing for PEth, self-reported alcohol use and measurements of liver damage.

Elevated PEth levels tracked closely with a person’s liver disease scores, researchers found.

However, people’s self-reports regarding their drinking did not strongly track with their liver disease -- possibly because they either minimized or couldn’t accurately remember how much alcohol they’d consumed, researchers said.

This was the largest examination yet of the association between PEth and liver damage, and is the first to compare PEth against self-reports in assessing a person’s risk of liver scarring, researchers added.

Liver scarring can be slowed or even reversed by cutting down on alcohol and eating a healthy diet lower in sugar, salt and fat, researchers said. But it’s critical to catch liver disease before it’s progressed to more severe stages.

Based on these results, PEth testing should be incorporated into routine blood panels that measure cholesterol and blood sugar levels, researchers said.

“To prevent and manage liver fibrosis, we need to know how much a person is drinking,” said lead researcher Pamela Murnane, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics with UCSF. "We clearly don’t have a good grasp on that with self-report.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on alcohol use and your health.

SOURCE: University of California, San Francisco, news release