[Alcohol and hematopoiesis]

In a survey of quantitative and qualitative changes of blood and blood-forming cell systems by big consumption of alcohol is informed about the frequency of such lesions and the importance of additional substances of alcohol, particularly of the fusel oils with their cancerogenic, mutagenic, hepato- and haemototoxic effects. The alcohol-conditioned lesions of the erythrocytopoiesis with disturbances of maturation by deficiency of folic acid under formation of a megaloblastosis, the alcoholinduced disturbances of the iron metabolism with increase of the sideroblasts as well as the formation of vacuoles in the cytoplasm of the proerythroblasts are discussed. In this connection the symptomatic anaemias, caused by alcoholic liver lesion and its sequelae as well as by ulcerous haemorrhage, particularly also of Zieve's syndrome, are discussed. Functional disturbances of the granulocytes and granulocytopenias are to be brought into connection with the particular susceptibility to infections of patients suffering from alcoholism. Functional disturbances of the thrombocytes and thrombocytopenias, to be sure, rarely lead to a haemorrhagic diathesis, deserve, however, more consideration as possible causing factors in apoplexias under big consumption of alcohol. On principle the direct alcohol-toxic (at least ethanol-toxic) defects of haemotopoiesis are reversible for a short time.