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Fatty acid ethyl esters in adipose tissue. A laboratory marker for alcohol-related death.

Fatty acid ethyl esters, a family of ethanol metabolites, are formed by esterification of ethanol with fatty acids and have been detected in human organs commonly damaged by ethanol abuse. Because alcohol-related deaths may occur up to six times as often as reported on death certificates, we undertook quantitation of these potentially longer-lived alcohol metabolites in postmortem human adipose tissue to assess their usefulness as a measure of recent ethanol exposure. After isolation and identification using sequential thin-layer and gas chromatography, fatty acid ethyl esters were present in adipose tissue of chronic alcoholics (mean +/- SEM equals 300 +/- 46 nmol/g), even though blood ethanol concentration at the time of death was undetectable. Unintoxicated nonalcoholic subjects who had no history of alcohol abuse had concentrations seven times lower (mean +/- SEM equals 43 +/- 13 nmol/g). In vitro studies demonstrate that fatty acid ethyl esters are synthesized by human adipose tissue in proportion to the ethanol concentration present and their half-life in adipose tissue of laboratory animals is 16 +/- 1.6 hours, ie, fourfold greater than that of alcohol. These results indicate that fatty acid ethyl esters are long-lived ethanol metabolites whose persistence and accumulation in adipose tissue may allow an accurate diagnosis of significant alcohol consumption even when ethanol has been completely eliminated from the body.