All You Need To Know About EtG Alcohol Test

Searching out for alcohol detection period in your system? Well, EtG Alcohol Test is the most common way to confirm alcohol intake.

Ethyl Alcohol or simply alcohol will get eliminated from your body rapidly – Approximately 1 drink/hour. While alcohol intake can be detected in various drug tests; like saliva, breath or blood, but mostly alcohol urine test is used.

What is the purpose of EtG Alcohol test?

EtG test is now being used by probation departments and courts as a way to test if people are drinking liquor or not. EtG testing is also used to monitor and evaluate whether a person is abstaining from the alcohol consumption or not.

What is Ethyl Glucuronide?

When you drink alcohol, your body will metabolize it at the rate of 1 drink/90 minutes (approx). When alcohol is excreted from your body, ethyl glucoronide, a side product of your body’s metabolization will remain in your system.

EtG is a direct metabolite of ethanol and is used as a biomarker to detect alcohol levels in urine. Its detection in urine is highly specific, like the testing labs look out for THC-COOH to detect the use of weed. EtG can be detected in your urine for about 3 days after the alcohol intake.

Typically testing labs utilize the most sophisticated, sensitive equipments and technology like LC/MS/MS, to confirm EtG presence. The results of EtG alcohol test are highly accurate. It’s also called “80 hour test” because it can detect EtG for 80 hours and in some cases up to 5 days.

Factors that can influence EtG alcohol Test

Well, there are some factors that can influence EtG alcohol test. No two persons will test positive for the exact duration of time. There will be difference due to the following factors:

1. Age
2. Gender
3. Weight
4. Frequency of drinking Alcohol
5. Amount of alcohol intake
6. Metabolism rate
7. Drinking on an empty stomach or full stomach
8. Ethnicity

If you want to know the details about these factors, you can read our previous article.

Can EtG Alcohol Test be positive for alcohol fermented by your body?

EtG test will be positive only for the alcohol consumed. I’m saying this because it’s possible to have alcohol in urine even without drinking it. This is due to the production of ethanol in vitro.

In this case, the ethanol is produced by the body and not metabolized by the liver, so EtG test will show negative result. Consequently, chances of false alcohol detection are lowered.

What are the key benefits of using an EtG test?

• EtG urine alcohol test can detect recent liquor intake more accurately than other drug tests.
• It can detect alcohol in urine for up to 80 hours.
• This is ideal for abstinence and zero tolerance situations
• EtG test will test positive only when the liquor is consumed and not produced as a result of fermentation.
• This test has a turnaround time of around 36 hours.
• This test helps in the successful monitoring of alcohol treatment programs.

Final Words

Even though there are a number of drug tests to detect alcohol intake, yet EtG alcohol test is being widely used by law officials. The main reason for it is the accuracy and longer time period.

Let us know in the comments if this article helped you in any way. If you’ve any other question related to this topic, you can ask that – We’ll try to solve it by consulting our experts.

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