Andrew C. Heath, D.Phil. (Director)

DEPARTMENT OF Psychiatry
Keywords: adolescent, alcoholism

Investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis 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 involves investigators from Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis University and the University of Missouri-Columbia. It also involves researchers from the Veterans Administration in St. Louis and Palo Alto, Calif. This multi-site center brings 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.

The NIAAA program currently funds 15 alcoholism research centers in the United States. The Missouri center is the only one focusing specifically on the causes of alcohol problems in adolescents and young adults. Because studies of adults with alcohol problems reveal that a very high proportion of alcoholics date the beginnings of their problems to adolescence, this center will focus on improving detection of alcohol problems in adolescents, searching for causes and risk factors operating in this age group. One of the genetic studies will be conducted 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.