Association Between Long-term Alcohol Consumption and Undercarboxylated Osteocalcin.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has focused on enhancing knowldge about the association between alcohol consumption and health, such as early detection of alcohol abuse, the appropriate actions to be taken after detection, and prevention of teenage drinking. They believe that it is necessary to develop and improve the methods for early detection of alcohol-related problems in an easy and effective way. Given this context, we hypothsized that simultaneous determination of osteocalcin (OC) and undercarboxylated osteocalcin ucOC), bone metabolic markers, would facilitate research on the effects of alcohol drinking. We divided volunteers into a group of long-term drinkers (heavy drinking for 20 years or more) and a group of social drinkers (moderate and controlled drinkers), and determined blood DC, ucOC, bone-specific alkaline phosphatase (BAP), and tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase isoform 5b (TRACP-5b) levels, as bone metabolic markers, and glutamic-oxaloacetic transaminase (GOT), mitochondrial GOT (m-GOT), glutamic pyruvic transaminase (GPT), and γ-glutamyl transpeptidase (γ-GTP) levels, as biochemical markers. In addition, we determined the levels of free and bound ethanol and methanol in urine as markers of alcohol abuse and dependence. The group of long-term drinkers showed significantly higher levels of OC and ucOC than the group of social drinkers (p < 0.01). Long-term drinkers also showed a significantly higher level of m-GOT than the social drinkers in the biochemical examinations (p < 0.01). Long-term drinkers showed a tendency to have increased free/bound ethanol and methanol levels in urine compared to social drinkers, but the differences were not statistically significant. The above results suggest that determination of the levels of OC and ucOC can provide useful information for the early detection of heavy drinkers, indicating that OC and ucOC may be used as markers for preventing alcohol dependence.