Editor,—There seem to be several possible problems with the recent paper by Oneta and colleagues (Gut1998;43:612–619). Firstly, blood ethanol concentrations said to result from an ethanol dosage of 0.225 g/kg were in the range of 0.2–0.3 mg/100 ml (figs 3–6 of Onetaet al's paper). These values are about 1% of the expected blood concentration for this dosage; presumably there was a 100-fold error in the labelling of the vertical axes of these four figures. Secondly, differences in the area under the curve were used to assess first pass metabolism when it has been repeatedly pointed out that this technique cannot be used when …