• Drug Testing
• Accreditation & Quality
• About Hair Testing
• FAQ
• Drugs We Detect
• Alcohol Test
• Drug Glossary (pdf)

A Hair Test For Alcohol Misuse

We offer the only ISO 17025 accredited hair test for alcohol misuse in the UK - and all our samples for alcohol analysis are conducted in our own UK laboratories; they are not posted abroad. Also our team of Reporting Scientists are based at our laboratories, and investigate and interpret the results of thousands of hair samples every year.

For your peace of mind and guarantee of quality, whenever a drugs or alcohol test result may be used in court proceedings, choose a laboratory that displays the UKAS Testing accreditation mark - any other mark such as an ISO 9001 badge (with the UKAS 'check' symbol) does not provide accreditation for the laboratory testing of hair for substance misuse.

Our analysis looks for the marker ethyl glucuronide (EtG), a metabolite of alcohol produced in the body when alcohol is consumed. Like any alcohol hair test, EtG detection should be considered as an additional supportive test in the diagnosis of alcohol misuse and used in corroboration along with CDT and LFT tests, which we can also provide. Ordering these three tests together is more likely to provide you a stronger profile of alcohol use.

We have built a database of EtG levels found in hair including samples provided by clinicians specialising in addiction and alcohol misuse, and have presented these findings at international scientific meetings; a peer reviewed paper has been published by Forensic Science International.

Unlike testing hair samples for drug misuse, it is not yet possible to rule out the effects of normal hygiene practices such as shampooing when analysing alcohol consumption over a period of many months. Our recent research in this field indicates that analysing a two or three centimetre length of hair month by month might provide an extra reference database to determine in particular if alcohol consumption has been reduced over a 2 or 3 month period.

Any test (for example an EtG, CDT, MCV or LFT test) for long-term or persistent alcohol misuse should be regarded as a corroborative rather than a definitive guide - i.e. where there is suspicion that there maybe alcohol misuse, an EtG test can help to corroborate that, especially if combined with a clinical assessment.

• Review of Scientific Data (pdf)