Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: EC:2.6.1.1 (aspartate aminotransferase)
 21,665 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

We conducted a prospective cohort study to describe the association between alcohol use, HIV disease progression, and drug toxicity and to determine health care provider awareness of excessive alcohol use by recruiting 881 HIV-infected veterans (median age, 49 years; 99% male; 54% African American) from 3 VA HIV clinics. Twenty percent of patients were hazardous drinkers by the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, 33% were binge drinkers, 32% had a chart ICD-9 alcohol diagnosis, and 12.5% and 66.7%, respectively, were described by their health care providers as currently and ever drinking "too much." Hazardous/binge drinkers more often had detectable viral loads (P < 0.001). Patients with alcohol diagnoses more often had elevated alanine transaminase or aspartate transaminase levels (P </= 0.02), anemia (P < 0.001), and elevated mean corpuscular volume (P < 0.001). Health care providers missed hazardous drinking in patients with undetectable viral loads (P = 0.01), patients without hepatitis C (P = 0.09), and patients with normal aspartate transaminase levels (P = 0.07) and missed alcohol diagnoses in patients without hepatitis and those with CD4 cell counts of >200/mL. We conclude that in HIV-positive veterans, hazardous drinking and alcohol diagnoses were common and associated with HIV disease progression and/or hepatic comorbidity and anemia. Health care providers more often missed alcohol problems in patients with less severe HIV infection and those without evidence of liver disease. Health care providers should routinely screen and counsel patients regarding alcohol problems as part of standard of care to minimize disease progression and bone marrow and hepatic toxicity.
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PMID:How harmful is hazardous alcohol use and abuse in HIV infection: do health care providers know who is at risk? 1286 42

Previous studies have demonstrated that automatic alcohol action tendencies are related to alcohol consumption and hazardous drinking. These action tendencies are measured with reaction time tasks in which the latency to make an approach response to alcohol pictures is compared with the latency to make an avoidance response. In the literature, 4 different tasks have been used, and these tasks differ on whether alcohol is a relevant (R) or irrelevant (IR) feature for categorization and on whether participants must make a symbolic approach response (stimulus-response compatibility [SRC] tasks) or an overt behavioral response (approach avoidance tasks [AAT]) to the pictures. Previous studies have shown positive correlations between measures of action tendencies and hazardous drinking and weekly alcohol consumption. However, results have been inconsistent and the different measures have not been directly compared with each other. Therefore, it is unclear which task is the best predictor of hazardous drinking and alcohol consumption. In the present study, 80 participants completed all 4 measures of action tendencies (i.e., R-SRC, IR-SRC, R-AAT, and IR-AAT) and measures of alcohol consumption and hazardous drinking. Stepwise regressions showed that the R-SRC and R-AAT were the only significant predictors of hazardous drinking, whereas the R-AAT was the only reliable predictor of alcohol consumption. Our results confirm that drinking behavior is positively correlated with automatic alcohol approach tendencies, but only if alcohol-relatedness is the relevant feature for categorization. Theoretical implications and methodological issues are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
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PMID:The validity of different measures of automatic alcohol action tendencies. 2607 98