Early work in human plasma showed elevations in a number of amino acids during withdrawal (Majumdar, Shaw, Thomson, Pratt, & Greenwood, 1983). In patients admitted to emergency rooms for alcohol intoxication, blood measures determined GABA and glutamate levels at admission (T1) and after 24h (T2). Relative to healthy controls, GABA levels were low and glutamate levels were high (but higher at T1 relative to T2) at both time points in the alcoholics (Brousse et al., 2012). CSF from alcohol-withdrawing patients shows elevations in NAAG (a neuropeptide) but not glutamate (Tsai & Coyle, 1998). The human frontal cortex harvested from alcoholics showed moderate upregulation of NMDA receptors relative to controls (Freund & Anderson, 1996).
