Jünger Elisabeth, Gan Gabriela, Mick Inge, Seipt Christian, Markovic Alexandra, Sommer Christian, Plawecki Martin H, O'Connor Sean, Smolka Michael N, Zimmermann Ulrich S
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York.
Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 2016 Aug;40(8):1769-78. doi: 10.1111/acer.13122. Epub 2016 Jun 24.
Adolescence is a critical period for the development of alcohol use disorders; drinking habits are rather unstable and genetic influences, such as male sex and a positive family history of alcoholism (FH), are often masked by environmental factors such as peer pressure.
We investigated how sex and FH modulate alcohol use in a sample of 18- to 19-year-olds from the Dresden Longitudinal Study on Alcohol use in Young Adults. Adolescents reported their real-life drinking in a TimeLine Follow-Back interview. They subsequently completed a training and an experimental session of free-access intravenous alcohol self-administration (i.v. ASA) using the computer-assisted alcohol infusion system to control for environmental cues as well as for biological differences in alcohol pharmacokinetics. During i.v. ASA, we assessed subjective alcohol effects at 8 time points.
Women reported significantly less real-life drinking than men and achieved significantly lower mean arterial blood alcohol concentrations (aBACs) in the laboratory. At the same time, women reported greater sedation relative to men and rated negative effects as high as did men. A positive FH was associated with lower real-life drinking in men but not in women. In the laboratory, FH was not linked to i.v. ASA. Greater real-life drinking was significantly positively associated with higher mean aBACs in the laboratory, and all i.v. ASA indices were highly correlated across the 2 sessions.
We conclude that adolescent women chose lower aBACs because they experienced adverse alcohol effects, namely sedation and negative effects, at lower aBACs than men. A positive FH was not apparent as risk factor for drinking in our young sample. The i.v. ASA method demonstrated good external validity as well as test-retest reliability, the latter indicating that a separate training session is not required when employing the i.v. ASA paradigm.
青春期是酒精使用障碍发展的关键时期；饮酒习惯相当不稳定，诸如男性性别和酗酒家族史（FH）等遗传影响常常被同伴压力等环境因素所掩盖。
我们在德累斯顿青年成人酒精使用纵向研究的18至19岁样本中，调查了性别和FH如何调节酒精使用情况。青少年在时间线回溯访谈中报告他们的实际饮酒情况。随后，他们使用计算机辅助酒精输注系统完成了一次训练和一次自由获取静脉酒精自我给药（i.v. ASA）实验，以控制环境线索以及酒精药代动力学的生物学差异。在i.v. ASA期间，我们在8个时间点评估了主观酒精效应。
女性报告的实际饮酒量显著低于男性，且在实验室中平均动脉血酒精浓度（aBACs）显著更低。与此同时，相对于男性，女性报告的镇静作用更强，且对负面影响的评分与男性一样高。阳性FH与男性较低的实际饮酒量相关，但与女性无关。在实验室中，FH与i.v. ASA无关。较高的实际饮酒量与实验室中较高的平均aBACs显著正相关，并且两次实验的所有i.v. ASA指标都高度相关。
我们得出结论，青春期女性选择较低的aBACs是因为她们在比男性更低的aBACs水平时就体验到了不良酒精效应，即镇静作用和负面影响。在我们的年轻样本中，阳性FH并未表现为饮酒的危险因素。i.v. ASA方法显示出良好的外部效度以及重测信度，后者表明在采用i.v. ASA范式时无需单独进行训练。
