Determination of carbohydrate-deficient transferrin in a Han Chinese population

BACKGROUND: Carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is a widely used alcohol biomarker. Because of the high prevalence of chronic alcohol abuse in many countries, CDT plays an important role in the areas of traffic, clinical, and forensic medicine. However, CDT levels have not been determined in the Han Chinese population. Therefore, we investigated the frequency of genetic transferrin variants and the relationship between CDT levels and alcohol consumption in this population. From this data, we established a CDT cut-off for Han Chinese and evaluated the analytical performance of the CDT capillary zone electrophoresis system. RESULTS: The prevalence of transferrin variants was 4.14%. The mean CDT level of the reference group was 0.73%. We recommended CDT level >1.5% as cut off standard of alcohol intake to ensuring the specificity was best. The CDT test total precision for 0.5%, 0.7%, and 1.55% was 14.4%, 11.5%, and 7.2%, respectively. The data showed good linearity in the studied range of 0.6% to 8.2%. CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that CDT is a useful marker to detect heavy daily alcohol consumption. We proposed and evaluated the first CDT cut-off for the Han Chinese population, and we showed that the CDT capillary zone electrophoresis system is a reliable analytic method.