The present analyses examined genetic influences on alcohol metabolism and their possible relationship to risk of alcohol dependence. Subjects were 206 Australian twin pairs who participated in an alcohol challenge protocol in 1979-1981, in which they were given a 0.75 g/kg dose of alcohol; blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) measured at five times over a 3-hr period after alcohol ingestion wer...

AIMS Archival data from structured interviews of 1193 male prison inmates were subjected to taxometric analysis to determine the latent structure of the alcohol use disorder construct. METHODS Analyses were performed using three taxometric procedures: mean above minus below a cut (MAMBAC), maximum eigenvalue (MAXEIG), and latent mode factor analysis (L-Mode). RESULTS The outcomes were based...

Background: High prevalence of risky behaviors in alcohol dependents have been shown in several studies, but correlation between alcohol abuse and risky behaviors and relapse in patients with opiate dependence has been less investigated. This study aimed to determine the effect of alcohol abuse in rate of risk-taking behaviors in opiate dependents patients treated on maintenance program in Nort...

BACKGROUND Substantial evidence exists for an important genetic contribution to alcohol dependence risk in women and men. It has been suggested that genetically determined differences in alcohol sensitivity may represent one pathway by which an increase in alcohol dependence risk occurs. METHODS Telephone interview follow-up data were obtained on twins from male, female and unlike-sex twin pa...

BACKGROUND Alcohol has been shown to critically modulate cyclic adenosine-3',5' monophosphate (cAMP) signaling. A number of downstream effectors that respond to the cAMP signals (e.g., protein kinase A, cAMP response element binding protein) have, in turn, been examined in relation to alcohol consumption. These studies did not, however, delineate the point at which the actions of alcohol on the...

A lmost one third of Americans consume enough alcohol to be considered at risk for alcohol dependence, and alcohol abuse and dependence are associated with more than 100,000 deaths from alcohol-related diseases and injuries each year. The economic cost of alcohol abuse and dependence was estimated at more than $184 billion for 1998.1 Use of screening tools and brief primary care interventions f...

Mental health is likely to be influenced by contextual variables that emerge only at the level of the group. We studied the effect of two such group-level variables, within-state income inequality and alcohol tax policy, on symptoms of current depression and alcohol dependence in a US national sample, controlling for state-level and individual characteristics. A cross-sectional US national prob...

BACKGROUND Alcoholism and depression frequently co-occur, but the origins of this comorbidity remain uncertain. Most previous family, twin, and adoption studies of these disorders have used cases ascertained through treatment settings, who may differ from cases in epidemiological samples. We studied the importance of genetic influences on risk for lifetime comorbidity of major depression and al...

BACKGROUND Alcoholism and substance dependence frequently co-occur. Accordingly, we evaluated the familial transmission of alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine dependence and habitual smoking in the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism. METHODS Subjects (n=1212) who met criteria for both DSM-III-R alcohol dependence and Feighner definite alcoholism and their siblings (n=2755) were rec...

OBJECTIVE To test whether variation in the gene encoding the enzyme catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), which catalyzes the breakdown of dopamine and other catecholamine neurotransmitters, is associated with the risk for alcohol dependence and habitual smoking. METHODS Single nucleotide polymophisms (SNPs) were genotyped in a sample of 219 multiplex alcohol-dependent families of European Ame...