Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Alcohol / Addiction / Illegal Drugs Also Included In: Eating Disorders;Genetics Article Date: 21 Aug 2013 - 8:00 PDT
Current ratings for: Eating disorders and alcohol abuse 'share genetic factors'
New research from the US suggests that having a genetic risk for alcohol dependence may also put people at higher risk for certain eating disorders, and vice versa.
In the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report how they discovered that some of the genes that influence alcohol dependence also influence certain eating disorder symptoms in men and women.
Their analysis suggests genes may explain 38-53% of the risk of developing these disorders.
First author Dr. Melissa Munn-Chernoff, a postdoctoral research scholar in psychiatry, says:
"In clinical practice, it's been observed that individuals with eating disorders also have high rates of alcohol abuse and dependence."
She adds that previous research into genetic links between alcohol dependence and eating disorders have tended to study women only, and that their study is the first to include men.
For their analysis, the team used data on nearly 6,000 adult twins in Australia that had taken part in another genetic study also designed to gather information about alcohol use and eating disoder symptoms.
By studying twins they could use stastical tools to find the odds of certain traits coming from the same genes, based on the fact that 100% of genes are the same in identical twins, and about 50% are the same in fraternal twins, as Dr. Munn-Chernoff explains:
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Eating disorders and alcohol abuse 'share genetic factors'