Test of a potential causal influence of earlier age of gambling initiation on gambling involvement and disorder: a multilevel discordant twin design.

Psychology of Addictive Behaviors Test of a Potential Causal Influence of Earlier Age of Gambling Initiation on Gambling Involvement and Disorder: A Multilevel Discordant Twin Design

Causal influence of age at first drink on alcohol involvement in adulthood and its moderation by familial context.

OBJECTIVE Previous research has established a connection between early age at drinking initiation and greater alcohol involvement in adulthood, but it has not yet been established whether this is a causal effect. The current study used a multilevel discordant twin design to examine individual and contextual effects, and an interaction between these effects, of the age at drinking initiation on ...

From alcohol initiation to tolerance to problems: Discordant twin modeling of a developmental process.

The current study examined a stage-based alcohol use trajectory model to test for potential causal effects of earlier drinking milestones on later drinking milestones in a combined sample of two cohorts of Australian monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twins (N = 7,398, age M = 30.46, SD = 2.61, 61% male, 56% monozygotic twins). Ages of drinking, drunkenness, regular drinking, tolerance, first n...

The family history method in disordered gambling research: a comparison of reports obtained from discordant twin pairs.

The purpose of this study was to examine potential biases in family history reports of problem gambling and gambling frequency. Same-sex twin pairs discordant for a history of problem (n = 230 pairs) and pathological gambling (n = 48 pairs) and for three indexes of gambling frequency (ever gambling, monthly gambling, and weekly gambling; n = 44-517 pairs) were identified from a large Australian...

Progression in substance use initiation: A multilevel discordant monozygotic twin design.

Considerable attention has been paid to the "gateway" pattern of drug use initiation in which individuals progress from tobacco and alcohol use to cannabis and other illicit drugs. The extent to which this sequence reflects a causal impact of licit substance use on illicit substance involvement remains unclear. Clarifying the mechanisms underlying substance use initiation may help inform our un...