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

DEPARTMENT OF Psychiatry
Kathleen Keenan Bucholz, Ph.D.; John W. Rohrbaugh, Ph.D.; Charles F. Zorumski, M.D.; Theodore Reich, M.D.; Joel Goebel, M.D.
Keywords: alcoholism, epidemiology, twin research, adolescent behavior

The Missouri Alcoholism Research Center (MARC) has grown out of interlinked research collaborations between alcoholism researchers at Washington University School of Medicine (the lead institution), Saint Louis University, the University of Missouri, Columbia, the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Medical Center, and Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Australia. The broad focus of the research program of the MARC concerns the etiology and course of alchohol problems and associated comorbidity in community samples of adolescents and youth. Center-wide research themes involve testing three classes of mediational models for alcoholism risk -- pharmacologic vulnerability, negative affect-regulation and deviance proneness -- in a series of prospective behavioral genetic and family studies as well as laboratory-based studies that represent a unique combination of psychosocial, behavioral, genetic, epidemiologic and experimental approaches. The center is organized as an administrative core, a modest pilot project core, three scientific cores (the assessment (AC) core, ascertainment, tracing and tracking (ATT) core, and the data-management and methodology (DMM) core) which provide critical support for the center's research projects and four research projects. The research projects include:

1) A prospective high-risk study of Missouri-born adolescent and young adult twin pairs aimed at identifying mediators or modifiers of genetic or environmental influences on alcoholism risk, including gender differences in mediators and risk-modifiers.

2) A prospective family study of Missouri-born adolescents and their siblings, including African-American families, which is designed to establish a paradigm for epidemiologic family studies and will provide important information about sibling and peer influences.

3) A laboratory study of the postural effects of alcohol and nicotine administered separately and jointly.

4) A pseudo-adoption study, involving the prospective assessment of the adolescent offspring of alcoholic and control mothers from the Australian twin panel and their MZ or DZ twin sisters, which will permit tests of key environmental mediation hypotheses while avoiding the under-representation of high-risk environments associated with the traditional adoption paradigm.

Despite the high economic and personal costs of alcohol misuse and associated comorbidity in adolescents and youth, the underlying etiologic mechanisms have been little investigated. Undertaking such an investigation is a goal that is the unifying theme of the MARC.