Introduction
Alcoholism is one of the most frequent addictions and is of great
interest to forensic and clinical medicine. Consequently, the
research in forensic toxicology has focused on the identification
of biochemical markers of ethanol consumption to diagnose
chronic heavy alcohol use, dependence or abstinence and to
analyze the alcohol rate in cases, where alcohol abuse can be
dangerous (e.g. driving, pregnancy, work place and child custody).
Alcohol itself cannot be used as an analyte for this purpose
because of its high volatility. However, there are several suitable
minor metabolites of ethanol from which fatty acid ethyl esters
(FAEE) and ethyl glucuronide (EtG) had been thoroughly
investigated.
The determination of FAEE and EtG allows a discrimination
between excessive repeated alcohol consumption (above 60 g