There are many situations or settings where it is necessary to screen people for alcohol consumption, including among organ transplant patients, those applying for a return of their suspended driver’s license, or those involved in child custody cases, and more.
Traditional alcohol screening methods involving hair or urine sampling have obvious and subtle drawbacks. Aside from the issue of a lack of specific or accurate results with these types of screens, traditional alcohol biomarkers can't always be used to make finer distinctions between social drinkers, heavy drinkers or alcoholics.
Phosphatidylethanol (PEth) is a more sensitive alcohol biomarker that can be detected in blood and is currently being studied by toxicology researcher Christophe Stove, PhD, and his team at Ghent University. PEth is already known to be a more advanced and specific way to measure alcohol use as compared to urine testing or other methods. Dr. Stove is investigating the variation at which PEth decreases in the bloodstream over the course of a month, to help improve and fine-tune this type of screening.
"We wanted to gain more insight into the behavior of PEth in people who normally drink alcohol, but at some point decide not to drink," says Stove. "Setting up a large-scale study like that is not very easy as it's quite complicated to find a large number of people that normally drink and then spontaneously decide not to drink for a month."
For that, he needed to recruit a large group of people who normally drink but were willing to abstain for a month. Dr. Stove made two decisions which made this much simpler.
He joined forces with Tournee Minerale, a month-long sobriety challenge well known in Belgium. He also took advantage of volumetric absorptive microsampling technology, in the form of Mitra® microsampling devices. The Mitra devices feature a special VAMS® tip that absorbs a precise volume of blood sufficient for lab analysis. Participants received Mitra devices at home in self-sampling kits. They were shown how to use the kits to easily collect their own dried specimens at different time points over the course of the month.
The benefits of finger-prick capillary blood collection aren’t exclusive to research study participants.
“We have collaborated with centers that do follow-up for people who have had their driver's license suspended and need to get it back,” Stove said. “We asked the centers if they would consider a finger prick blood test as a possible option [for tracking a driver's sobriety.] They were quite enthusiastic about it. They considered [finger-stick blood sampling] more feasible because they could do that without the requirement of medically trained staff.”
Dr. Stove and his team are currently determining the results of the study. “The vast majority of the remote blood samples that we got back look good from a technical perspective,” Stove says. “We are busy with the analysis of these thousands of samples that we got back. In the next few months, we'll finish those analyses, and then we'll come out with the actual outcome of the study.”
"The centers that would not use PEth would be, let's say, the interesting centers for the people that need to undergo testing."
Such are the challenges of process improvement for those working ahead of the curve.
As part of the work of cutting-edge organizations such as Ghent University, microsampling technologies are helping to advance health, wellness, and alcohol testing programs forward.
Image credits: Trajan, iStock