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- Posts: 2
- Joined: Sun May 10, 2020 7:36 pm
I am ill from a very strange but interesting disease in that my body produces endogenous acetaldehyde on its own without any alcohol involvement. You could say I am sort of half-drunk all the time with the strangest of symptoms. It turns you into a complete physical wreck and has quite the influence on the brain too, nothing works as it should any more when you have this. It is a not yet properly researched disease in relationship with the digestive tract, I could tell a whole lot about it but I think I will leave that for now but trust me it is a real and serious illness.
I had my blood tested for endogenous acetaldehyde and the result was that it was a whopping 10 times over the limit. Later when I had managed to make my disease somewhat less I tested again and the acetaldehyde level had dropped considerably but was still to high. Blood samples were very well taken care of and were also tested for ethanol to rule out artificial formation of acetaldehyde as much as possible. Ethanol was below detection point so that is good. Method used was whole-blood gas chromatography at a professional forensics toxicology lab. For my purpose this method was sort of good enough it does not matter that much if there was some margin of error because it was so completely out of the norm. But to compare other people’s levels this method is just a bit to inaccurate and not repeatable enough as far as I know.
There has been very little research into endogenous acetaldehyde blood levels in humans without alcohol involvement and as far as I know also not in people with specific health complaints. The levels are normally very, very low. Some of this research is already quite old, one research paper on PubMed is
“Studies of whole blood-associated acetaldehyde levels in teetotalers.“ ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8216889)
And I wonder how they produced such repeatable low-level results to compare.
My question is :
How would you go about measuring endogenous acetaldehyde blood levels accurately and repeatable with today’s modern equipment and methods ?
People I am really sort of begging for your help here, I know very little about it other than that measuring acetaldehyde in blood is a bit tricky business but it has been done before, and that there are smart persons here on this forum who would know how to do such a thing.
I would like to learn more about a suitable method and in the future find a laboratory willing to do such tests to find people with the same disease as me. Who knows maybe your input could even help lead to something like that happening in the future ? That would be quite something because there are actually many more people out there with the same problem but they are simply unrecognized / undiscovered yet. It is a very interesting medical phenomena. So I really hope you can help me with this I would not know a better place to ask and turn to at this moment.