TWIN/FAMILY STUDY OF VULNERABILITY TO SUBSTANCE ABUSE

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Three cohorts, each consisting of 165 pairs of male twins aged 11, 18, and 25 will be ascertained from birth records, and recruited, together with their biological parents and a male sibling, where available, to participate in a two-day laboratory assessment. One-third of each cohort will consist of high-risk families in which the biological father has a history of substance abuse (SA); the remainder of each cohort will be unselected. Half of the twin pairs will be monozygotic and half of the MZ and DZ twin families will reside in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area and the other half in out-state Minnesota. The assessment will involve structured psychiatric interviews and assessment of substance use, cognitive and neuropsychological tests, inventories of personality, interests, and talents, assessment of psycho- physiological markers associated with SA or with psychiatric disorders that entail risk for SA, and assessment of family and peer group characteristics, and a daily activities diary. The twins and siblings will participate in a one-day follow-up laboratory assessment in the 5th year of the project. It is intended that these twin-families will subsequently be follow-up over a 7 year period. The 165 high-risk families will permit a joint analysis of established and putative risk factors for SA. The 330 unselected twin-families will provide data for multivariate biometrical- genetic analysis of these risk factors in juvenile, late adolescent, and young-adult males. The central purpose of this study is to identify the mechanisms of genotype-environmental covariation and interaction that determined the natural history of substance abuse.