{"doi":"10.3390/epigenomes9010001","title":"Two Clinically Implementable Digital PCR Assessments of DNA Methylation for Diagnosing Heavy Alcohol Consumption","abstract":"BACKGROUND: Heavy alcohol consumption (HAC) has a profound adverse effect on human health. Unfortunately, there is a relative lack of tools that are easily implementable in clinical settings and that can be used to supplement self-reporting in the diagnosis and management of HAC. In part, this paucity is due to limitations of currently available biological measures and a mismatch between available biological measures and the needs of clinicians managing HAC. OBJECTIVES: We first review the pros and cons of existing biological measures. Next, we review the underlying theory and the performance characteristics of two recently developed methylation-sensitive digital PCR (MSdPCR) assays, referred to as the Alcohol T Score (ATS) and ZSCAN25, for the assessment of chronic and recent HAC, respectively. Finally, we outline a paradigm for improving the clinical diagnosis and management of alcohol use disorders by utilizing these new markers of alcohol consumption. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that further studies to understand the test performance characteristics of each of these epigenetic tools in larger, diverse populations are in order.","journal":"Epigenomes","year":2024,"id":487609,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9529,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":250298,"name":"Steven R. H. Beach","orcid":"0000-0001-8053-7761","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":361244,"name":"Allan M. Andersen","orcid":"0000-0001-7006-7639","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":54807,"name":"Robert A. Philibert","orcid":"0000-0001-7822-4977","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":82,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:08:10.215754Z","pmid":"39846568","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}