General cognitive ability - Historical highlights
12 important questions on General cognitive ability - Historical highlights
Drug addiction is a disease
Drug use is a choice, drug addiction is not
Behaviroral genetics and drug use
Studying the causes of individual differences in the use of drug: Relative influence of genes and environment at different stages of drug use.
Identification of genes that exert an influene at different stages of drug use.
Interplay of genes and environment.
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Diagnosing alcohol use disorder
Dependency --> Looks more at characteristics like you drank more than you intended to drink, you need to drink more to have the same effect, you notice the negative effects if you don't drink alcohol.
Recently in DSM-V one disorder with multiple levels.
Alcohol consumption is a worldwide major public health concern.
World health organization
Alcohol consumption contributes to 3 million deaths each year globally as well as to the disabilities and poor health of millions of people. Overall, harmful use of alcohol is responsible for 5.1% of the global burden of disease.
Heritability of the two dimensions (smoking)
Both initiation and dependency are determined by genes --> A
Heritability is much higher for dependency
Only initiation is determined by common environment.
The environment often plays a large role in initiation, but genes determine the development.
The biological processes become more important when you talk about dependency.
Here too a lot of possivle interactions between genes and environment (parental monitoring)
Parental monitoring --> The extent to which parents know what their children are doing, keep track of their activities and discuss this with them.
Interaction between environment and genes --> parental monitoring changes the relative influence of genes: changes the relative influences of genes.
The higher the parental monitoring, the lower the additive genetic influence. This leads to an increase in common environmental influence.
So if someone is genetically vulnerable but grows up in an environment that counteracts this you can see that the genes have less influence.
Meta analysis on cannabis use Heritability
Initiation --> 48% A, 25% C, 27% E.
48% of individual differences between people is caused by genes.
Problem use 51%A 20%C, 29% E.
The herritability increases a little but not as strongly as seen in alcohol and smoking. For women however there is a larger difference in heritability between initiation and problem use.
Interesting question --> Is Dutch drug policy, associated with higher heritability of cannabis initiation? These are the same estimates as for other countries so there is no Gxe interaction.
Genes play a role in all drug addictions
In the diagram you see that for any illicit drug use disorder the heritability is between 30 and 70% --> So also for drugs that are forbitten, heritability has a role.
Opiates and cocaine have a heritability around 0,60
Options for genetic influences across phase
Genes that are important in earlier phases also play a role in later phases.
New genes play a role in later phases.
Both old genes and "new" genes play a role at later phases.
Cage data is used in heritability studies which led to the outcome that
The heritability went up as the participants were older.
Heritability went up from 28% for 15-17 year to 58% for 21-23 yer and remained at this level for later ages.
The environment has a larger influence when you are younger.
Heritability can differ also for DSM comoponents
If you look at the DSM components, you see that there are different factors.
You see that some of the components are more genetically determined like preoccupation with a heritability estimat of 59% and others are less genetically determined like desire to quit with a herritability of 36%
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