La Follette School of Public Affairs, Department of Sociology, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Health Econ. 2021 Jan;30(1):194-203. doi: 10.1002/hec.4183. Epub 2020 Nov 3.
This paper uses policy-induced variation in legal access to alcohol in the United States to explore interactions between genetic predispositions and health behaviors. It is well known that Minimum Legal Drinking Age (MLDA) laws have discrete impacts on binge drinking behaviors, but less is known about heterogeneity of the effects and the characteristics of individuals most and least affected. Using the Add Health data, this paper explores differential policy effects based on polygenic scores (PGS), which are genome-wide summary measures predicting health outcomes. Specifically, we leverage PGS for alcoholism and for a broader set of risk-taking behaviors to explore heterogeneities in response to the policy and consider mechanisms for the responses. Like previous literature using the Add Health and other datasets, we find main effects of MLDA in increasing recent binge drinking episodes by approximately 5 percentage points. We find MLDA effects are concentrated entirely in individuals with high PGS for alcohol use. We are also able to compare these results with measures of parental alcoholism as a global proxy for family history.
本文利用美国法律对酒精的获取的政策变化，来探索遗传倾向与健康行为之间的相互作用。众所周知，最低法定饮酒年龄（MLDA）法对狂饮行为有明显的影响，但对于这些影响的异质性以及受影响最大和最小的个体的特征，人们知之甚少。本文利用 Add Health 数据，基于多基因评分（PGS）来探索基于遗传因素的差异政策效应，PGS 是一种预测健康结果的全基因组综合测量方法。具体来说，我们利用酒精成瘾和更广泛的风险行为的 PGS，来探索对政策的反应的异质性，并考虑反应的机制。与之前使用 Add Health 和其他数据集的文献一样，我们发现 MLDA 的主要影响是使最近的狂饮事件增加了大约 5 个百分点。我们发现 MLDA 的影响完全集中在酒精使用 PGS 较高的个体中。我们还能够将这些结果与父母酗酒的指标进行比较，将其作为家族史的一个整体代理。
