What impact does alcoholism have on the body?

What impact does alcoholism have on the body?

Alcoholism is a medical and social problem, sometimes with legal implications, with a substantial impact on the life of the affected individual, his family and even the community.

Long-term effects of alcohol consumption
The medical impact is mainly due to chronic consumption and the direct toxic effect on all organs and tissues, but especially on the brain (addictive effects, neuropsychic adverse effects, depression, neuropathy), on the liver (toxic hepatitis, liver cirrhosis) or the stomach (cancer gastric), but it can also be due to its acute consumption, known as binge-drinking, ultimately resulting in coma and death.

The legal impact is essentially related to acute consumption, and the social impact, for family and community, is related to both: domestic violence, loss of custody, divorce, placement of children in the care of third parties, can occur against the background of chronic alcohol consumption and acute.

The impact of alcohol on the body 
Differentiating between isolated alcohol abuse and chronic consumption is very important and is done by testing specific markers:

- ethyl alcohol determined directly in exhaled air or in the blood is a test limited to a few hours after consumption (maximum 15, but varies from one individual to another), because alcohol is very quickly transformed in the liver;

- alcohol detected indirectly , by measuring metabolites:

Acute consumption can be detected and measured by measuring the compound ethylglucuronide, up to 36 hours in the blood and 4 days in the urine after the moment of abuse.

For chronic consumption, CDT (or carbohydrate deficient transferrin) is used, which is measured as a percentage of total transferrin. The percentage increases if more than 100 grams of hard alcohol or more than one bottle of wine is consumed daily for several weeks, as abstinence leads to a decrease in the percentage, with a half-life of 7-14 days.

In conclusion, what tests do we use depending on the purpose?
Serum ethanol in the first hours after acute consumption;
Ethylglucuronide in serum (first 36 hours) or urine (maximum 4 days);
Confirmation of a positive ethyl glucuronide result is done by measuring ethyl sulfate in the urine;
Phosphatidyl-ethanol detected in blood can confirm alcohol consumption for up to 12 days;
CDT diagnoses chronic alcoholism and monitors abstinence.