Genetic and Experiential Antecedents of Alcoholism: A Prospective Study

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
SUMMARY: The present work builds on an extensively studied obstetrical cohort that includes a group of individuals, now in their midteens, who had a parent treated for alcoholism. To generate a comparable sample today would not only require a very large effort (many years and considerable expense), but might not be possible in most countries because of lack of records or restricted access to them, as well as difficulty in, locating people after long periods. Such a study is still possible in Denmark, which has a long tradition of cooperation between public officials and scientific investigators and invaluable centralized population and psychiatric registers.Since such an opportunity may not present itself again, and since it is difficult to anticipate which avenues of investigation will be more profitable, the study is designed as a collaborative effort by investigators from a number of disciplines: psychiatric, psychological, neurologic, sociologic, biochemical, and electrophysiologic. From the enormous amount of data collected, genetic and experiential antecedents of alcoholism and associated psychopathology can be identified.

This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit: