Education and alcohol use: A study of gene-environment interaction in young adulthood

Abstract

The consequences of heavy alcohol use remain a serious public health problem. Consistent evidence has demonstrated that both genetic and social influences contribute to alcohol use. Research on gene-environment interaction (GxE) has also demonstrated that these social and genetic influences do not act independently. Instead, certain environmental contexts may limit or exacerbate an underlying genetic predisposition. However, much of the work on GxE and alcohol use has focused on adolescence and less is known about the important environmental contexts in young adulthood. Using data from the young adult wave of the Finnish Twin Study, FinnTwin12 (N=3,402), we used biometric twin modeling to test whether education moderated genetic risk for alcohol use as assessed by drinking frequency and intoxication frequency. Education is important because it offers greater access to personal resources and helps determine one’s position in the broader stratification system. Results from the twin models show that education did not moderate genetic variance components and that genetic risk was constant across levels of education. Instead, education moderated environmental variance so that under conditions of low education, environmental influences explained more of the variation in alcohol use outcomes. The implications and limitations of these results are discussed.

Social Relationships Moderate Genetic Influences on Heavy Drinking in Young Adulthood

“…Responses were 0 (never), 1 (once a year), 2 (2-4 times a year), 3 (every other month), 4 (once a month), 5 (more than once a month), 6 (once a week), 7 (more than once a week), and 8 (daily). We transformed this ordinal measure in to a pseudo-continuous measure of days intoxicated per month (30 days), as described previously (Barr et al, 2016;Cooke et al, 2015), with possible responses ranging from 0 to 30. Heavy drinking was then log-transformed (plus a constant of one).…”

Cultural Value Orientations and Alcohol Consumption in 74 Countries: A Societal-Level Analysis

“…We also included estimates for Income (Gross National Income per capita, based on purchasing power parity; data are in current international dollars based on the 2011 ICP round) and for Education (average years of education by people ages 25 and older) to act as control variables. The decision to control for these two variables was empirically driven because they have been found to be associated with alcohol consumption ( Grittner et al, 2013 ; Barr et al, 2016 ). These values are available for individual years and were extracted from the World Bank Open Data set ( The World Bank Group [WBG], 2016 ) and Human Development Index Data set ( United Nations Developmental Programme, 2014 ), respectively.…”

FinnTwin12 Cohort: An Updated Review

“…In adolescence, twins reported on their recent life events (Salvatore, Meyers et al, 2015), their parents' knowledge about their plans and activities, how they were spending their money, where and with whom they spent leisure time (Chassin et al,1993), and their affiliations with deviant peers. In young adulthood, they reported on whether they were involved in a committed romantic partnership; the number of their social support providers and those with whom they could share feelings and concerns (Barr et al, 2017); years of completed education and student status (Barr et al, 2016;Latvala et al, 2011); their employment status and experiences with unemployment and parenthood.…”