Introduction:
Carbohydrate-deficient transferrin (CDT) is a known biomarker for chronic alcoholism detection. The clinical use of CDT is varied: alcohol detoxification programs monitoring abstinence of the alcohol-dependent patients, assessing of pre-natal exposure and evaluating alcohol misuse in subjects applying for the re-granting of driving license between others. Over the years, studies have been carried out on various factors and substances that may affect the levels of CDT, among which are tobacco use. In fact, a further clinical application field of CDT is that in which it is used as marker of pathological conditions correlated or not to alcohol abuse. The aim of this study is to assess whether CDT levels are affected by tobacco use.

Methods:
The sample comprised 82 pregnant women at 9 to 12 weeks of gestation. %CDT levels were performed using the capillary zone electrophoresis system (Sebia®, France). Afterwards, they were interviewed about tobacco use and it was recorded as number of cigarettes per day. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 22.0

Results:
Of de 82 pregnant, 19 (23,2%) were smokers with an average of 5,52 cigarettes per day, min 1, max 20 (CI95% 3,15-7,89). The correlation between CDT values and number of cigarettes/day were not statistically significant, n=82 (p=0,1; r=0,179)

Conclusions:
Our results are not in line with other studies carried out about tobacco use, in which it was found a significant correlation between tobacco use and CDT levels. Nonetheless, our results are close to being statistically significant, and not reaching a value of p<0,05 may be due to the fact that pregnant women are underreporting the tobacco daily use because they know the harmful effect of tobacco on the unborn child. We believe that more subjects are necessary to obtain a final conclusion.