Detection of the Direct Alcohol Biomarker Ethyl Glucuronide (EtG) in Hair An Annotated Bibliography

Ethyl glucuronide (EtG) is considered to be a promising candidate marker of alcohol consumption, but exhibits a short window of detection in blood or urine. Keratinized tissues are known to retain foreign substances and to provide a greater retrospective window of detection than body fluids. Therefore, post-mortem hair, skin swabs, and stratum corneum samples were collected from four subjects with a reported history of alcohol misuse and from seven subjects with a report of regular, socially accepted drinking behavior, and were investigated for EtG. Additionally, certain specimens were collected from three children, who had not yet consumed any alcoholic beverages. EtG was detectable in most of the hair and stratum corneum samples as well as in perspiration stains from alcohol-consuming subjects. The results indicated that EtG might be formed locally in very small and highly variable amounts. The most important finding was that EtG cannot be expected to be generally detectable in keratinized tissues or perspiration stains from alcohol-drinking subjects, whereas a positive result is always associated with recent alcohol consumption. Implication of this study This German paper was the first to publish EtG hair data. There were 11 post-mortem cases to supplement a previous unpublished presentation at a conference. This GC/MS EI method used methyl glucuronide as the internal standard with a LOD of 5000 pg/mg using 50 mg of specimen.