Investigators at the School of Medicine have received a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) to launch a center to study genetic and environmental factors that affect the risk of alcoholism in adolescents and young adults.
The Missouri Alcoholism Research Center will involve investigators from Washington University, Saint Louis University and the University of Missouri-Columbia. It also will involve researchers from the Veterans Administration in St. Louis and Palo Alto, Calif. The center's director, Andrew C. Heath, Ph.D., and colleagues will focus primarily on alcohol problems in adolescents.
"We became a multi-site center to bring together alcoholism researchers with expertise in genetics, psychosocial issues and environmental risk factors in order to understand how these influences interact to cause problems in some while sparing others," said Heath, a professor of psychology in psychiatry at the medical school.
The NIAAA program currently funds 15 alcoholism research centers in the United States. The Missouri center will be the only one focusing specifically on the causes of alcohol problems in adolescents and young adults.
Studies have revealed that most adults develop alcohol problems during adolescence. But, Heath said, "We are not very good at detecting alcohol problems in adolescents, and we don't really understand much about the causes and risk factors operating in this age group."
The Missouri Alcoholism Research Center will conduct one of its genetic studies on adolescent male twins in Missouri. By looking at both identical and fraternal twins, the investigators will be able to test for genetic influences on alcohol problems and the precursors to those problems.
Other investigators include William True, Ph.D., from Saint Louis University, and Kenneth Sher, Ph.D., from the University of Missouri-Columbia. A second study, led by True, will focus on environmental factors by studying the children of female twins in Australia. The investigators will interview children of identical female twins in which only one of the twins is an alcoholic. "That study should give us a very sensitive test for the environmental influences associated with an alcoholic mother," True said.
True will run a closely related project -- not directly under the umbrella of the center -- studying twin Vietnam-era veterans to look for more genetic risk factors for alcoholism and problem drinking. He also will study the twins' children, giving the investigators information not only on the offspring of female alcoholics in Australia but of male alcoholics in the United States.
Because so many alcoholics also smoke, other research projects will look at whether an addictive personality predisposes some people both to smoking and to alcohol use. Additional studies will focus on the diminished attention span of people who are drunk and why some people get sad when they drink while others seem happier.
The center's studies will go beyond uncovering risk factors for drinking. They also should reveal a great deal about the extent of alcohol problems among Missouri adolescents, according to Kathleen K. Bucholz, Ph.D., research associate professor of epidemiology in psychiatry and deputy director of the center. "I think it's important to remember that this is the Missouri Alcoholism Research Center," Bucholz said. "And we'd like to disseminate the information gleaned from our research so that we can have an impact in Missouri."
