This is how alcohol affects your liver values

The breakdown of alcohol mainly takes place in the liver. This leaves its mark: if you drink too much, you damage your liver. The effects are not noticeable at first due to noticeable symptoms, but often due to altered liver values.

“Liver values” is the umbrella term for various substances that come from the liver and can be detected in the blood. Abnormal liver values ​​are often found in a blood test.

They suggest that the subject may have consumed risky amounts of alcohol in the weeks (or months or even years) before. In addition to alcohol, there may also be other causes of altered liver values, such as viral inflammation of the liver (viral hepatitis).

Someone who has consumed too much alcohol for a few weeks usually has elevated liver values ​​such as:

These are proteins that occur in the liver tissue and are involved in certain metabolic processes there. The technical term for proteins that perform this task is enzymes – which is why the substances mentioned are also referred to as liver enzymes.

Good to know: the transaminases AST and ALT used to have different names, namely GOT (glutamic-oxaloacetic transaminase) and GPT (glutamic-pyruvic transaminase). Sometimes doctors still use these old terms.

There are two main reasons why people who consume alcohol in excess often have elevated liver enzymes: on the one hand, alcohol causes the liver cells to produce higher amounts of gamma-GT. On the other hand, the other liver enzymes enter the blood to a greater extent when liver cells are damaged.

At the onset of alcoholic liver disease, liver enzymes are only slightly elevated — if at all: In some people, consumption does not initially affect levels.

In addition to liver enzymes, there are other blood values ​​that can change with long-term alcohol consumption. In particular, an increased concentration of the CDT value is considered useful. CDT is the abbreviation for carbohydrate-deficient transferrin, which means something like “carbohydrate-free transferrin”.

Transferrin is a protein formed in the liver that is responsible for transporting iron around the body. Each transferrin molecule has multiple carbohydrate chains. Alcohol and its breakdown products can cause an increase in “incomplete” transferrin, which is equipped with fewer carbohydrate chains.

In addition, alcohol can hinder the maturation of red blood cells (erythrocytes). As a result, these become too large, which is reflected in the blood test in an increased MCV value. MCV is the abbreviation for mean corpuscular volume and stands for the average volume of a red blood cell.

If you have abnormal liver values ​​after drinking too much alcohol and therefore do not drink alcohol, you may wonder how long the values ​​will remain elevated.

In many cases, the values ​​normalize quite quickly: usually a few weeks without alcohol are enough to normalize the liver values, approx

The MCV value may be abnormal for up to 16 weeks. However, these are all guidelines – the exact duration varies from person to person.