Liability to alcohol dependence (AD) is heritable, but little is known
about its complex polygenic architecture or its genetic relationship with other
disorders. To discover loci associated with AD and characterize the relationship
between AD and other psychiatric and behavioral outcomes, we carried out the
largest GWAS to date of DSM-IV diagnosed AD. Genome-wide data on 14,904
individuals with AD and 37,944 controls from 28 case/control and family-based
studies were meta-analyzed, stratified by genetic ancestry (European, N =
46,568; African; N = 6,280). Independent, genome-wide significant effects of
different ADH1B variants were identified in European
(rs1229984; p = 9.8E-13) and African ancestries (rs2066702; p = 2.2E-9).
Significant genetic correlations were observed with 17 phenotypes, including
schizophrenia, ADHD, depression, and use of cigarettes and cannabis. The genetic
underpinnings of AD only partially overlap with those for alcohol consumption,
underscoring the genetic distinction between pathological and non-pathological
drinking behaviors.
94 35 NIH/NIAAA, Office of the Clinical Director 95 ABSTRACT 180Liability to alcohol dependence (AD) is heritable, but little is known about its complex 181 polygenic architecture or its genetic relationship with other disorders. To discover loci 182 associated with AD and characterize the relationship between AD and other psychiatric 183 and behavioral outcomes, we carried out the largest GWAS to date of DSM-IV 184
At the work site, smoking accounts for increased health care expenses and worker absenteeism due to smoking-related illness and reduced productivity and lost wages. Developing comprehensive and accessible smoking cessation programs at the work site is an important objective for health care professionals. In this study, employees of 43 corporations participated in a televised smoking cessation program accompanied by self-help manuals. The media component involved presenting a smoking cessation program on a network television affiliate station during the 4:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. news for 20 days. Employees at half the corporations also had access to semiweekly self-help group meetings. Adding self-help support groups to a program involving self-help manuals and the media reports was found to significantly increase abstinence and its maintenance over time. The implications of using the media, self-help groups, and work site locations in large-scale community-based interventions are discussed.
Background: Peer drinking is one of the most robust predictors of college students' alcohol use and can moderate students' genetic risk for alcohol use. Peer effect research generally suffers from 2 problems: selection into peer groups and relying more on perceptions of peer alcohol use than peers' selfreport. The goal of the present study was to overcome those limitations by capitalizing on a genetically informed sample of randomly assigned college roommates to examine multiple dimensions of peer influence and the interplay between peer effects and genetic predisposition on alcohol use, in the form of polygenic scores.Methods: We used a subsample (n = 755) of participants from a university-wide, longitudinal study at a large, diverse, urban university. Participants reported their own alcohol use during fall and spring and their perceptions of college peers' alcohol use in spring. We matched individuals into their rooms and residence halls to create a composite score of peer-reported alcohol use for each of those levels. We examined multiple dimensions of peer influence and whether peer influence moderated genetic predisposition to predict college students' alcohol use using multilevel models to account for clustering at the room and residence hall level.Results: We found that polygenic scores (b = 0.12), perceptions of peer drinking (b = 0.37), and roommates' self-reported drinking (b = 0.10) predicted alcohol use (all ps < 0.001), while average alcohol use across residence hall did not (b = À0.01, p = 0.86). We found no evidence for interactions between peer influence and genome-wide polygenic scores for alcohol use.Conclusions: Our findings underscore the importance of genetic predisposition on individual alcohol use and support the potentially causal nature of the association between peer influence and alcohol use.
Dating several people in emerging adulthood has been associated with higher alcohol use compared to being single or being in an exclusive relationship. As a follow-up to that report, we examined whether romantic relationship status is part of a pathway of risk between antecedent alcohol use risk factors and subsequent alcohol outcomes. Participants were 4,410 emerging adults assessed at two time-points during their first year of college. We found that a parental history of alcohol problems was indirectly related to dating several people via two modestly correlated pathways. The first pathway was through conduct problems. The second pathway was through positive urgency (i.e., a positive emotion-based predisposition to rash action). In turn, dating several people was associated with higher alcohol use. Our results suggest that these familial and individual-level alcohol risk factors are related to emerging adults' selection into subsequent romantic relationship experiences that are associated with higher alcohol use. These findings have implications for how romantic relationship experiences may fit into developmental models of the etiology of alcohol use.
Eating disorders and substance use disorders frequently co-occur. Twin studies reveal shared genetic variance between liabilities to eating disorders and substance use, with the strongest associations between symptoms of bulimia nervosa and problem alcohol use (genetic correlation [r g ], twin-based = 0.23-0.53). We estimated the genetic correlation between eating disorder and substance use and disorder phenotypes using data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Four eating disorder phenotypes (anorexia nervosa [AN], AN with binge eating, AN without binge eating,
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