Perspectives in Using of Laboratory Biomarkers in Diagnostics of Alcohol Use in the Prenatal Period

Aim. To analyze laboratory diagnostic methods confirming the fact of alcohol consumption in order to determine the possibility of using the most effective methods in screening for the detection of alcohol in the blood of women of reproductive age and pregnant women.

Key points. The analysis of domestic and foreign scientific literature was carried out using the keywords: fetal alcohol syndrome, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, pregnancy, biomarkers of alcohol consumption, phosphatidylethanol, blood test. The review was compiled according to the databases: Scopus, MedLine, The Cochrane Library, CyberLeninka, RSCI, etc. The material was collected on the basis of the literature data of review articles, the selection was carried out depending on the scientific value, with the formation of the final list of references according to the relevance of the analyzed material.

This review included 35 articles (36.4% of the total number of records found). All entries included were original articles, of which there were 15 prospective cohort studies, 20 observational-descriptive studies. The studies analyzed phosphatidylethanol (PEth), and other biomarkers in newborn blood in neonatal blood and in pregnant women. In 80% of the included articles, PEth was found to be a more sensitive diagnostic tool than other biomarkers of alcohol use.

Conclusion. Pregnant women tend to underreport their alcohol use, which creates a need for sensitive and specific biomarkers. Studies show that PEth has a high specificity in the diagnosis of alcohol use and provides the ability to determine the fact of alcohol consumption in the prenatal period in pregnant women and in the blood of a newborn. In general, the accumulated data allow us to consider the determination of PEth in the blood as a promising marker of episodic alcohol use, both in small and large doses, as well as chronic alcohol intoxication. An urgent task for further research is to study the sensitivity, specificity, threshold values of PEth for various regimens of alcohol consumption and alcoholization.

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