1,246 results match your criteria: "Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics[Affiliation]"

Drinking motives are strong proximal predictors of alcohol use behaviors and may represent a mediational mechanism by which different individual predispositions toward internalizing or externalizing psychopathology lead to the development of alcohol misuse. However, whether the association is due to a causal relationship or a shared etiology (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As the premier global traumatic stress society, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) has an important role to play in educating and raising awareness about the consequences of traumatic events, such as the war in Ukraine. On November 12, 2022, during its 38th annual meeting, the ISTSS hosted an invited Presidential Panel, chaired by Ananda Amstadter during her term as ISTSS President, that brought together trauma experts Peter Ventevogel, Marit Sijbrandij, Vitalii Klymchuck, Iryna Frankova, and Angela Nickerson to highlight how traumatic stress professionals can assist individuals affected by the war in Ukraine. The present paper summarizes the key points from the panel and discusses future challenges anticipated for people affected by the war.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Life is pain: Fibromyalgia as a nexus of multiple liability distributions.

Am J Med Genet B Neuropsychiatr Genet

November 2023

Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA.

Fibromyalgia is a complex disease of unclear etiology that is complicated by difficulties in diagnosis, treatment, and clinical heterogeneity. To clarify this etiology, healthcare-based data are leveraged to assess the influences on fibromyalgia in several domains. Prevalence is less than 1% of females in our population register data, and about 1/10th that in males.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Studies on the genetic factors involved in binge drinking (BD) and its associated traits are very rare. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate differences in the association between impulsivity, emotion regulation and BD in a sample of young adults according to the rs6265/Val66Met variant in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene, a well-known candidate gene in alcohol use disorders. We recruited 226 university students (112 women), aged between 18 and 25 years old, from two centers in France.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: - Comorbidity between psychiatric disorders is extensive but, from a genetic perspective, still poorly understood. Modern molecular genetic approaches to this problem are limited by a reliance on case-control designs.

Methods: - In 5 828 760 individuals born in Sweden from 1932-1995 with a mean (s.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Much of what is known about parental divorce and adult alcohol outcomes comes from cross-sectional comparisons of those who did and did not experience parental divorce. In contrast, far less is known about whether and how parental divorce is associated with alcohol consumption trajectories. We used a longitudinal perspective to investigate the associations between parental divorce and men's alcohol consumption trajectories as well as a genetically informative approach to evaluate whether the pattern of genetic and environmental influences on these trajectories differed for men who did and did not experience parental divorce.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine whether alcohol use disorder (AUD) can be transmitted contagiously in siblings and likely acquaintances growing up close to one another (Propinquity-of-Rearing Defined Acquaintances [PRDAs]).

Method: PRDAs were pairs of same-age subjects growing up within 1 km of each other and sharing the same school class, where one of whom (PRDA1) was first registered for AUD at age 15 or older. Using adult residential location, we predicted proximity-dependent risk for an AUD first registration in a second PRDA within 3 years of PRDA1's registration.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * Method: 553 adults were surveyed after experiencing either violent or nonviolent injuries, assessing their social support levels initially and PTSD symptoms 30 days later.
  • * Results: Nonviolent injury victims reported lower PTSD symptoms and social support, but social support didn't significantly influence PTSD related to injury type, highlighting the need for violence intervention programs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Subjective memory concern has long been considered a state-related indicator of impending cognitive decline or dementia. The possibility that subjective memory concern may itself be a heritable trait is largely ignored, yet such an association would substantially confound its use in clinical or research settings.

Objective: To assess the heritability and traitlike dimensions of subjective memory concern and its clinical correlates.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Brain structural changes are known to be associated with psychotic symptoms, with worse symptoms consistently associated with brain volume loss in some areas. It is not clear whether volume and symptoms interfere with each other over the course of psychosis. In this paper, we analyse the temporal relationships between psychosis symptom severity and total gray matter volume.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Are genetic risk factors for current depressive symptoms good proxies for genetic risk factors for syndromal major depression (MD)?

Methods: In over 9000 twins from the population-based Virginia Adult Twin Study of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders, the occurrence of all nine DSM symptomatic criteria for MD in the last year was assessed at personal interview and then grouped by their temporal co-occurrence. The DSM criteria which occurred outside (OUT) inside of (IN) MD episodes were then separated. We calculated tetrachoric correlations for OUT and IN depressive criteria in monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) pairs and fitted univariate and bivariate ACE twin models using OpenMx.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Previously, a study using a sample of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD)® study from the earlier 1.0 release found differences in several resting state functional MRI (rsfMRI) brain connectivity measures associated with children reporting anhedonia. Here, we aim to reproduce, replicate, and extend the previous findings using data from the later ABCD study 4.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Scientists think that certain genes related to how our bodies handle alcohol might affect how likely people are to become dependent on it.
  • They studied people from Ireland with severe alcohol dependence to see how their genes are different from those of people without this problem.
  • They found some differences in how the genes work, but didn’t find significant differences in the main genes that break down alcohol, suggesting those specific genes might not play as big of a role as they thought.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although trauma exposure (TE) is a transdiagnostic risk factor for many psychiatric disorders, not everyone who experiences TE develops a psychiatric disorder. Resilience may explain this heterogeneity; thus, it is critical to understand the etiologic underpinnings of resilience. The present study sought to examine the genetic underpinnings of psychiatric resilience using genome-wide association studies (GWAS), genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA), and polygenic risk score (PRS) analyses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: To determine, in a general population, how much rates of stress reactions (SR), major depression (MD), alcohol-use disorder (AUD) and drug-use disorder (DUD) increase after the death of close relatives.

Methods: SR, MD, AUD, and DUD registrations were assessed from national Swedish registries. From the population followed from 2000 to 2018, those exposed to death of a close relative in 2002-2016 were matched to unexposed controls and analyzed in males and females by a controlled pre-post design using a difference-in-difference method.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Heritability Estimation of Cognitive Phenotypes in the ABCD Study Using Mixed Models.

Behav Genet

May 2023

Center for Multimodal Imaging and Genetics, San Diego School of Medicine, University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA.

Twin and family studies have historically aimed to partition phenotypic variance into components corresponding to additive genetic effects (A), common environment (C), and unique environment (E). Here we present the ACE Model and several extensions in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study (ABCD Study), employed using the new Fast Efficient Mixed Effects Analysis (FEMA) package. In the twin sub-sample (n = 924; 462 twin pairs), heritability estimates were similar to those reported by prior studies for height (twin heritability = 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Large-scale mental health surveys screen participants for the presence of the core diagnostic criteria of a mental disorder such as major depressive disorder (MDD). Only participants who screen positive are administered the full diagnostic module; the remainder "skip-out." Although this procedure adheres faithfully to the psychiatric classification of mental disorders, it limits the use of the resulting survey data for conducting high-quality research of importance to scientists, clinicians, and policymakers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: We sought to clarify the causal nature of the bidirectional associations in adulthood between substance use disorder (SUD) and psychosocial dysfunction (PSD).

Method: As assessed from National Swedish registers, SUD is measured by alcohol use disorder (AUD) and drug use disorder (DUD) and PSD by unemployment (UN), low income (LI), and high community deprivation (HCD). A cross-lagged structural equation model from ages 31 to 48 is applied to the native Swedish population born 1960-1980 and residing in Sweden at age 29 followed through 2017 ( = 2,283,330), excluding individuals with prior SUD and PSD.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Binge drinking is characterized by excessive alcohol use and is widespread in youth. We explore the relationship between binge drinking's risk factors by considering (a) aggregate genetic liability (polygenic risk score [PGS]) for alcohol use and problems and (b) impulsivity-related processes. We examined whether the associations between PGS and binge drinking were mediated by impulsivity, with a possible shared genetic liability between alcohol phenotypes and impulsivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Two predominant phenotypic models of causality exist to explain the high co-occurrence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use disorder (AUD): the self-medication and susceptibility models. Population-based longitudinal studies that simultaneously examine both models are needed. Thus, the goal of the present study is to test these models using the Swedish National Registries.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine, using a top-down genetic analysis, the degree of specificity of the genetic risk factors for individual forms of substance use disorders (SUD).

Method: We examined and followed to December 31, 2018, all individuals born in Sweden between 1960 and 1990 ( = 2,772,752) diagnosed with any of the following six SUDs: alcohol use disorder (AUD), drug use disorder (DUD), or one of four specific forms of DUD involving cannabis (CUD), cocaine and other stimulants (CSUD), opioids (OUD), or sedatives (SeUD). We examined population subsamples at high versus median genetic liability to each of these SUDs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Genetic and Cultural Transmission of Alcohol Use Disorder in Swedish Twin Pedigrees.

J Stud Alcohol Drugs

May 2023

Department of Human and Molecular Genetics, Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

Article Synopsis
  • This study explored how genetic and environmental factors contribute to alcohol use disorder (AUD) using data from Swedish national registries, focusing on extended family lineages of twins.* -
  • Researchers analyzed AUD definitions through various records, studying nearly 162,469 individuals across 18,971 family trees, finding that heritability is significant, estimated at 50%-60%, especially higher in men compared to women.* -
  • Results indicate that shared environmental influences also play a vital role, accounting for about 10%-20% of risk, with additional factors contributing to the remaining variance; this highlights the complex nature of AUD's origins.*
View Article and Find Full Text PDF