Statistical interpretation of medical data of patients with alcohol abuse

An attempt is made to assess a set of biochemical, kinetic and anthropometric data for patients suffering from alcohol abuse (alcoholics) and healthy patients (non-alcoholics). The main goal is to identify the data set structure, finding groups of similarity among the clinical parameters or among the patients. Multivariate statistical methods (cluster analysis and principal components analysis) were used to assess the data collection. Several significant patterns of related parameters were found to be representative of the role of the liver function, kinetic and anthropometric indicators (conditionally named “liver function factor”, “ethanol metabolism factor”, “body weight factor”, and “acetaldehyde metabolic factor”). An effort is made to connect the role of kinetic parameters for acetaldehyde metabolism with biochemical, ethanol kinetic and anthropometric data in parallel.