Folia Medica 62(3): 519-524, doi: 10.3897/folmed.62.e49220
Acute exogenous intoxications and homocysteine
expand article infoStoilka Tufkova§, Diana Paskaleva|, Milena Sandeva§
‡ Department of Clinical Toxicology, St George University Hospital, Plovdiv, Bulgaria§ Medical Simulation Training Center, Medical University of Plovdiv, Plovdiv, Bulgaria| Department of Nursing Care, Faculty of Public Health, Medical University of Plovdiv, Plovdiv, Bulgaria¶ Department of Midwifery Care, Faculty of Public Health, Medical University of Plovdiv, Plovdiv, Bulgaria
Open Access
Abstract

Inroduction: Oxidative stress is an important pathogenetic factor in a number of socially significant diseases, including the acute exogenous poisoning. Homocysteine is a sulfur-containing amino acid synthesized on the basis of methionine, which plays an important role as an oxidizing agent in the human body. As such a factor, it was the monitored subject of this study.

Aim: To measure the level of homocysteine in acute exogenous poisoning with alcohol, heroin and cerebro-toxic drugs.

Materials and methods: This is a prospective longitudinal study including 118 patients with moderate or severe acute poisoning with cerebro-toxic drugs (n=45), alcohol (n=40), heroin (n=33) and a “control group” (n=35). Clinical laboratory tests were performed according to the standards of a clinical laboratory. In the statistical analysis we used alternative and variance analysis, parametric methods for hypothesis assessment, and nonparametric methods for normal distribution.

Results and discussion: The results showed that for the three groups of intoxications, the average homocysteine levels were higher than those of the control group (р<0.001). The intergroup comparison criterion for normal distribution showed that the changes in patients with alcohol intoxication (u=3.39; р<0.001) and heroin intoxication (u=2.00; р<0.001) were highly statistically significant without correlating with the severity of the poisoning (р>0.05).

Conclusion: There is a risk of oxidative stress in intoxication with alcohol and narcotics. A reliable marker for the complex evaluation of oxidative stress in people is monitoring the serum level of homocysteine and its careful interpretation.

Keywords
homocysteine, oxidative stress and acute exogenous intoxications