Research People and Projects

The objective in this project is to advance the understanding of the mechanisms through which parental divorce/separation and marital discord influence offspring alcohol use disorder (AUD) and related outcomes (e.g., earlier age at first drink and alcohol misuse). The goal here is tou se data from two intergenerational, genetically-informative studies. The first is the Virginia Adult Twin Study of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders, a sample of European ancestry twins (N=9345, 45% female) recruited from birth records for whom direct psychiatric interview data were collected on all twins plus a subset of parents (N=1472, 58% female), with additional parental data collected via diagnostic psychiatric family history interviews with the twins. The second is the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (N=11561, 53% female), a molecular genetic study of an ethnically diverse (69% European American, 31% African American) sample of families primarily recruited via treatment-seeking probands for whom psychiatric interview data were collected from all participants. These two samples are mutually informative in permitting examination of the generalizability and convergence of findings across different methods and populations. Guided by a bio- ecological framework, the aims are to: (1) examine the extent to which associations between parental divorce/separation, parental marital discord, and offspring alcohol outcomes reflect direct (i.e., ‘causal’) effects versus shared genetic effects; and (2) examine whether offspring genetic factors predict variability in their responses to parental divorce/separation and parental marital discord. The results may inform clinicians’ psychoeducation efforts to prevent alcohol misuse among offspring from families experiencing marital distress and divorce. More broadly, this work will delineate how genetic factors and close relationship factors come together to influence the onset, persistence, and discontinuity of alcohol misuse.