ABSTRACT
Ethanol administration causes a lot of complications in different organs in the body. The main object of this work was to study the effect of ethanol administration on energy metabolism in the skeletal muscles. In this study, ouabain and oligomycin were used as Na- K ATPase inhibitor and mitochondrial ATPase inhibitor, respectively, to determine the total and specific ATPase activity in the quadriceps muscle. It was found that alcohol causes a significant increase in catabolic pathway evidenced by increase in ATP, adenosine and inosine. It was noticed that ATPase activity was not too much affected and this may be due to the fact that ATPase is a multienzyme complex which can catabolize both ATP formation and hydrolysis. Ethanol has a dual action on ATPase activity. It may increase ATP synthesis by increasing reducing equivalents. On the contrary, it increases ATP hydrolysis by increasing lactic acid accumulation