Barr Peter B, Salvatore Jessica E, Maes Hermine, Aliev Fazil, Latvala Antti, Viken Richard, Rose Richard J, Kaprio Jaakko, Dick Danielle M
Department of African American Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA; Department of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.
Department of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA; Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2016 Aug;162:158-67. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.06.031. Epub 2016 Jun 22.
The consequences of heavy alcohol use remain a serious public health problem. Consistent evidence has demonstrated that both genetic and social influences contribute to alcohol use. Research on gene-environment interaction (GxE) has also demonstrated that these social and genetic influences do not act independently. Instead, certain environmental contexts may limit or exacerbate an underlying genetic predisposition. However, much of the work on GxE and alcohol use has focused on adolescence and less is known about the important environmental contexts in young adulthood. Using data from the young adult wave of the Finnish Twin Study, FinnTwin12 (N = 3402), we used biometric twin modeling to test whether education moderated genetic risk for alcohol use as assessed by drinking frequency and intoxication frequency. Education is important because it offers greater access to personal resources and helps determine one's position in the broader stratification system. Results from the twin models show that education did not moderate genetic variance components and that genetic risk was constant across levels of education. Instead, education moderated environmental variance so that under conditions of low education, environmental influences explained more of the variation in alcohol use outcomes. The implications and limitations of these results are discussed.
大量饮酒的后果仍然是一个严重的公共卫生问题。确凿的证据表明，遗传和社会因素都对饮酒行为有影响。基因 - 环境相互作用（GxE）的研究也表明，这些社会和遗传影响并非独立起作用。相反，某些环境背景可能会限制或加剧潜在的遗传易感性。然而，许多关于GxE与饮酒行为的研究都集中在青少年时期，而对于青年期重要的环境背景了解较少。利用芬兰双胞胎研究（FinnTwin12，N = 3402）青年期的数据，我们采用生物统计学双胞胎模型来检验教育程度是否会调节饮酒频率和醉酒频率所评估的饮酒遗传风险。教育很重要，因为它能让人更多地获取个人资源，并有助于确定一个人在更广泛分层系统中的地位。双胞胎模型的结果表明，教育程度并未调节遗传方差成分，且遗传风险在不同教育水平上保持不变。相反，教育程度调节了环境方差，因此在低教育水平条件下，环境影响对饮酒结果变异的解释更多。本文讨论了这些结果的意义和局限性。
