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ETHANOL METABOLISM: REGULATION BY GENETIC FACTORS IN NORMAL VOLUNTEERS UNDER A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT AND THE EFFECT OF CHRONIC ETHANOL ADMINISTRATION

The scientific meeting of the National Council on Alcoholism in April of 1971 achieved several worthy goals. One of its notable accomplishments was the disclosure of several promising new approaches to the genetic and environmental factors that may lead to alcoholism. My own contribution does not involve alcoholics but normal volunteers. Nevertheless, the results may be of interest from the point of view of the metabolic derangements that eventually develop in alcoholism. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent of individual variation in ethanol metabolism in healthy adults not receiving ethanol or other drugs for the month preceding the investigation and to define the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors to these differences. This investigation of the metabolism of ethanol was conducted in two separate and unrelated parts and with two different groups of volunteers. In the first part, 14 pairs of adult, Caucasian twins living in the Washington, D.C., area who had abstained from ethanol and other drugs for the month preceding the study received, beginning at 0900 and continuing over a 10-minute period, a single oral dose of 1 ml per kilogram of 95% ethanol diluted with ice water. Beginning one and one-half hours after ethanol ingestion was completed and continuing at half-hour intervals until five or six specimens had been collected, we drew blood specimens (12 ml each), which were anticoagulated with 0.1 ml of 40% sodium citrate. The plasma was withdrawn and in most cases assayed immediately for ethanol, although it was frozen for several days in some cases prior to assay. Ethanol was assayed by slight modification of the method of Goldbaum and colleagues.' The modification consisted in substitution of 28.5% Ucon LB-550-X (polypropylene glycol) for the liquid phase. Into each of two test tubes (13 X 100 mrn) 1 ml of plasma was pipetted. The tubes were sealed with clean rubber stoppers* and heated in a water bath at 42' C for 30 minutes. Preliminary experiments indicated that the samples could be heated for four hours without loss of ethanol. After heating, 1.4 ml of the vapor phase was withdrawn with a 6-ml disposable syringe fitted with a 25 g X 1.5-inch needle. The sample was assayed in a Barber Coleman gas liquid chromatograph with an argon ionization detector and argon as the carrier gas. The 6 foot column was packed with 28.5% Ucon 550X on chromosorb W, 80 to 100 mesh. The column temperature was maintained at 102' C; the flash heater and detector were kept at 125' and 140' C, respectively. Retention time of the ethanol was approximately four minutes. A standard curve of peak height against ethanol concentration was linear over a range from 0 to 100 PI per ml. Duplicate determinations of ethanol were almost always within 5% of each other; in specimens in which the ethanol values were further apart, ethanol was redetermined in two additional 1-ml aliquots from the same sample. Among the 14 pairs of twins whose rates of ethanol metabolism were deter-