Analytical and diagnostic aspects of carbohydrate deficient transferrin (CDT): A critical review over years 2007–2017

摘要

Highlights ? The diagnosis of alcohol abuse requires the use of biomarkers in order to integrate the information emerging from self-reports/questionnaires and clinical examination. ? CDT is one of the most used biomarker in both clinical and forensic fields, due to its recognized high specificity. ? In the last ten years, numerous papers have been published on CDT, witnessing the great interest of the researchers in this topic. These papers have critically been reviewed in the present work. Abstract The need for investigating alcohol abuse by means of objective tools is worldwide accepted. Among the currently available biomarkers of chronic alcohol abuse, carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is one of the most used indicator, mainly because of its high specificity. However, some CDT analytical and interpretation aspects are still under discussion, as witnessed by numerous research papers and reviews. The present article presents a critical review of the literature on CDT appeared in the period from 2007 to 2017 (included). The article is organized in the following sections: (1) introduction, (2) pre-analytical aspects (3) analytical aspects (4) diagnostic aspects (5) concluding remarks. As many as 139 papers appeared in the international literature and retrieved by the search engines PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus are quoted.