Many selleckchem of these were analyzed here for the first time. Overall findings show that four nonsynonymous SNPs are related to the rate of metabolism of alcohol. These are ADH1B Thr60Ser, ADH1C Gly78X, ADH1C Arg272Gln, and ADH1C Ile350Phe, which explain 2.5%, 9.0%, 8.4%, and 12.3% of the variability in the metabolic rate, respectively. Our findings

do not support the theoretical models predicting alterations in the AUC, with lowest values in carriers of the ADH1B 48His allele, but are consistent with the model predicting lower AUC in carriers of nonmutated ADH1C enzymes compared with carriers of mutated enzymes.6 The current study confirms the lack of effect of the ADH1B Arg48His in the metabolic rate of alcohol in white subjects, in agreement with independent studies,11–13 and, with the single exception of the polymorphism ADH1B Thr60Ser, it rules out a major effect in vivo for the rest of the ADH1B polymorphisms analyzed. Although consistent evidence has indicated

that the ADH1B*3 allele (48 Arg+370 Cys) is associated with variability in alcohol metabolism,35, 36 this allele is specific to African subjects12 and is not relevant to white subjects (Table 4). In contrast to ADH1B, genetic variation in ADH1C seems to be relevant to alcohol metabolism in whites (Table 5), even after the use of correction for the huge multiple comparison problem presented by the set of data presented in this study. There is little MAPK inhibitor information on the effect in vivo of the gene variants associated with decreased ethanol metabolic rate. For example, the ADH1B Thr60Ser seems to be rather conservative, but in contrast the ADH1C Gly78X likely results in largely dysfunctional enzyme. These gene variants have been described

very recently, and no functional in vitro studies have been performed so far. The identification of polymorphisms related to decreased alcohol metabolism in whites carried out in this study is likely to have relevant implications, and not only because of the clear relationship between the polymorphisms and the ethanol elimination rate shown in Table 5: Although no major association of these SNPs was observed with the Cmax and the association with the AUC value is weak, the functional significance of the observed decrease in the metabolic rate associated with variant alleles is of crucial find more importance, because in this study the alcohol challenge was based on a single dose, whereas alcohol consumption follows a pattern of multiple dosing, and therefore alcohol accumulation and eventually higher concentrations in blood are expected to occur in carriers of the variant allozymes as compared with noncarriers. No effect of CYP2E1 polymorphisms on alcohol pharmacokinetics or effects was observed in this study. We analyzed the most common CYP2E1 variant allele in the 5′ flanking region, CYP2E1*5, which showed a minor allele frequency equal to 3.4%.