Retrospective self-reports of sensitivity to the effects of alcohol: Trait-like stability and concomitant changes with alcohol involvement.

Abstract

Objective: Lower sensitivity to the acute effects of alcohol is known to confer risk for the development of alcohol use disorder. Alcohol sensitivity, or level of response to alcohol's subjective effects, is heritable but also can change as a result of persistent alcohol exposure (i.e., acquired tolerance). Here, we examined how changes over time in four indices of alcohol involvement affected scores on two validated, retrospective self-report measures of alcohol response-the Self-Rating of the Effects of Alcohol (SRE) form and the Alcohol Sensitivity Questionnaire (ASQ)-in a sample of emerging adult drinkers. Method: Participants (N = 173; M age = 19.5 years; 60% assigned female at birth) completed the ASQ, SRE, and measures of alcohol use and problems at two time points separated by a median of 0.77 years (range: 0.30-2.54 years). Results: Multiple linear regression showed that increases in drinking over this period accounted for increases in SRE and ASQ scores (i.e., in reported numbers of drinks needed to experience subjective effects of alcohol). Increased drinking accounted for more variance in the number of drinks needed to experience lighter drinking versus heavier drinking effects, and increases in the number of drinks consumed per occasion had a larger effect than did changes in total numbers of drinks consumed, number of bingedrinking occasions, or drinking-related problems. Conclusions: Findings suggest that both SRE and ASQ capture some stable, trait-like variability in alcohol response as well as some state-dependent, within-person variability in alcohol response acquired through increases in alcohol involvement. Public Health Significance StatementThe findings in this report provide evidence that validated questionnaire measures of individual differences in level of response to alcohol, also known as subjective response, are sensitive to changes in young adults' drinking over time. Given that a reduction in level of response to alcohol is an indicator of possible alcohol use disorder (AUD), these findings support the use of these questionnaire measures to track changes in AUD risk over time.

Mesocorticolimbic system reactivity to alcohol use-related visual cues as a function of alcohol sensitivity phenotype: A pilot fMRI study

“…Strategic over-sampling of "rare" cases (e.g., people with LS to alcohol who endorse light alcohol use, people with HS to alcohol who endorse heavier or more problematic alcohol use) also may be useful. Furthermore, longitudinal studies spanning the developmental trajectory of alcohol use will be critical for isolating the effects of sensitivity vs. use on neural ACR because sensitivity and use may covary over time (e.g., innate LS to alcohol may promote heavier use, but heavier use itself may lead to acquired LS to alcohol [i.e., tolerance]) [ 89 ]. Longitudinal studies of neural ACR also are important because incentive sensitization and other theorized neurobiological mechanisms of the addiction cycle posit progressive accumulation functional neuroadaptations with chronic use [ 90 , 91 ], which should be evident as within-person changes in neural ACR and may be obscured in case-control studies by high between-person variability in neural ACR.…”