The genetics of alcohol metabolism: role of alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase variants.

The primary enzymes involved in alcohol metabolism are alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) and aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH). Both enzymes occur in several forms that are encoded by different genes; moreover, there are variants (i.e., alleles) of some of these genes that encode enzymes with different characteristics and which have different ethnic distributions. Which ADH or ALDH alleles a person carries influence his or her level of alcohol consumption and risk of alcoholism. Researchers to date primarily have studied coding variants in the ADH1 B, ADH1C, and ALDH2 genes that are associated with altered kinetic properties of the resulting enzymes. For example, certain ADH1B and ADH1C alleles encode particularly…