Genetic approaches to alcohol dependence

Genetic approaches to alcohol dependence.

Genetic approaches to addiction: genes and alcohol.

AIMS Alcoholism is a chronic relapsing disorder with an enormous societal impact. Understanding the genetic basis of alcoholism is crucial to characterize individuals' risk and to develop efficacious prevention and treatment strategies. METHODS We examined the available scientific literature to provide an overview of different approaches that are being integrated increasingly to advance our k...

Genetic factors influencing alcohol dependence.

Plentiful data from both animal and human studies support the importance of genetic influences in substance abuse and dependence (Bierut et al., 1998; Tsuang et al., 1998; Kendler et al., 2003). This review summarizes the evidence supporting such genetic influences, places them into perspective regarding animal and human studies, discusses the importance of both genes and environment, and highl...

Oligogenic Approaches to the Predisposition of Alcohol Dependence

Using data from a two stage family study (totally 255 families, 1102 genotyped subjects) we searched for an ethnicityindependent oligogenic configuration of interacting loci that explained the observed susceptibility to alcohol dependence. Our analyses were caried out under the constraint of reproducibility as during the adaptive search one set of families served as "training" samples while the...

Smoking and the genetic contribution to alcohol-dependence risk.

Genes influence a person's risk of becoming a smoker as well as the risk of alcohol dependence. Because substantially higher rates of smoking are observed in alcoholics than in control groups, uncovering the mechanisms underlying this association may have important implications for both treatment and prevention. Data analyses from the 1981 Australian twin panel cohort confirm a positive genetic...