Author: Alex Thompson

New NIH Study Reveals Shared Genetic Markers Underlying Substance Use Disorders National Institute of Mental Health NIMH

Published today in Nature Mental Health, the study was led by researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis, along with more than 150 coauthors from around the world. Anybody can develop an SUD, and they can do it for any number of reasons in their life. But does that mean your chance of addiction is essentially a coin flip if you have a family history of SUD? It’s a little more complicated than that, says addiction psychiatrist Akhil Anand, MD.

“In many ways, it’s no different than having a family history with heart disease or diabetes,” says Dr. Anand. About half of your susceptibility to developing a substance use disorder (SUD) can be hereditary. Genetics can mark you as more prone to use alcohol, tobacco products or drugs such as cocaine, heroin and opioids. More good news is that drug use and addiction are preventable. Results from NIDA-funded research have shown that prevention programs involving families, schools, communities, and the media are effective for preventing or reducing drug use and addiction. Although personal events and cultural factors affect drug use trends, when young people view drug use as harmful, they tend to decrease their drug taking.

Researchers continue to learn about how your genes and environment interact to affect your risk of addiction. Through this research, they can help lessen the stigma of addiction, treat drug addiction faster, and create individual prevention and treatment plans for people with addictions. “Substance use disorders and mental disorders often co-occur, and we know that the most effective treatments help people address both issues at the same time. The shared genetic mechanisms between substance use and mental disorders revealed in this study underscore the importance of thinking about these disorders in tandem,” said NIMH Director Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D. “Using genomics, we can create a data-driven pipeline to prioritize existing medications for further study and improve chances of discovering new treatments.

When Addiction Runs in the Family

The long-lasting biological effects of drug exposure cause a multitude of adverse effects throughout the body. Despite these well-known health consequences and widespread public health campaigns to curb use of addictive drugs, prevalence remains high. Among individuals aged 12 and older in the U.S. in 2015, an estimated 30.2 million (11.3%) smoked cigarettes daily in the past month; 15.7 million (5.9%) had an alcohol use disorder and 7.7 million (2.9%) had an illicit drug use disorder in the past year [1]. Individuals with addiction often have strong desires to quit, but rates of successful treatment and recovery are low. For example, among adult U.S. smokers during 2015, an estimated 68% wanted to quit, 55% had made a quit attempt in the past year, but only 7% had recently quit [2].

1. People who are recovering from an addiction will be at risk for relapse for years and possibly for their whole lives.
2. A properly functioning reward system motivates a person to repeat behaviors needed to thrive, such as eating and spending time with loved ones.
3. Relatively few GWAS have been reported for cannabis, stimulants, or opioids.
4. Reliance on blood-specific regulatory effects could even lead to erroneous conclusions, as illustrated by the cis-eQTL SNP rs having opposing directions of association with CHRNA5 expression in lymphoblastoid cell lines, as compared to frontal cortex [49].

This reduces the high that the person feels compared to the high they felt when first taking the drug—an effect known as tolerance. They might take more of the drug to try and achieve the same high. These brain adaptations often lead to the person becoming less and less able to derive pleasure from other things they once enjoyed, like food, sex, or social activities. If you begin to use drugs at an early age, it can change your brain development. If you have a harsh family situation or weak bonds with your siblings and parents, you may be at a higher risk for addiction.

Human Genetics of Addiction: New Insights and Future Directions

One study looked at young people and their development of certain disorders. It found that drug use in people in early adolescence was strongly linked to things in the environment like family and social factors. New methods are being developed that will allow researchers to analyze data concurrently, as applied in plant [138] and mouse model [139] studies. Colocalization (COLOC) [141] also enables concurrent integrative analyses. Comparisons of these and other methods will be needed to establish standard analytic practices. Next, the researchers look for segments of chromosomes that are more common in affected people compared to unaffected.

GTEx, Brain eQTL Almanac, and others provide an unprecedented opportunity to carry out comprehensive analyses in normal brains. Future studies are needed for more thorough and well-powered assessment of brain tissues in participants with addiction phenotype data. Where once a single ‘omics type was used, studies that capture multiple ‘omics data types in the same dataset are emerging.

Find out how NIMH engages a range of stakeholder organizations as part of its efforts to ensure the greatest public health impact of the research we support. NIMH statistics pages include statistics on the prevalence, treatment, and costs of mental illness for the population of the United States. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution.

Other genes are discovered first in an animal model and confirmed later in people. Studying mice has led to the discovery of many addiction-related genes, plus a deeper understanding of how the genes function. Disease can be woven into your DNA — and that includes the disease of drug addiction.

Getting to NIMH

Therefore, education and outreach are key in helping people understand the possible risks of drug use. Teachers, parents, and health care providers have crucial roles in educating young people and preventing drug use and addiction. Most drugs affect the brain’s “reward circuit,” causing euphoria as well as flooding it with the chemical messenger dopamine. A properly functioning reward system motivates a person to repeat behaviors needed to thrive, such as eating and spending time with loved ones. Surges of dopamine in the reward circuit cause the reinforcement of pleasurable but unhealthy behaviors like taking drugs, leading people to repeat the behavior again and again. In order for you to develop an addiction, you first have to experiment with drugs.

GWAS for cigarette smoking

But it’s hard to understand whether a person’s drug addiction was caused by genetic factors or family influence if their parents also were addicted. To understand the genetic risk even more, experts looked at adopted children whose biological parents were addicted to drugs. Studies suggest that about half of a person’s risk of developing a drug addiction is based on their genetic makeup. This means that specific genes passed down in your family may put you at a higher risk for drug addiction. To understand your risk for drug addiction, it’s important to look at these two factors together.

For example, if you have a close relative that’s affected, it’s a clue to be extra careful. But the same pill does nothing for one friend and makes another feel sick. Differences like these are often caused by differences in genes. Clearly, your family tree isn’t the sole indicator of addiction risk.

New NIH Study Reveals Shared Genetic Markers Underlying Substance Use Disorders

Understanding how genes cause biological differences can lead to improved treatments for substance use disorder. Updates about mental health topics, including NIMH news, upcoming events, mental disorders, funding opportunities, and research. Your ability to get drugs is important in the development of drug addictions. If you’re able to buy and use drugs easily, you’ll be more at risk for addiction. They found that adopted children had a higher risk of drug addiction if their biological parents were addicted. Experts also found that an adopted child’s risk of drug addiction was higher if their biological parent had alcoholism, criminal convictions, or a severe psychiatric illness.

Many things play into drug addiction, also known as substance use disorder. Why will some people become addicted to substances, while others won’t? Your likelihood for addiction depends on both your genes and your overall environment. Addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease that alters the brain’s reward circuitry and consequently leads to compulsive drug seeking and other behavioral changes.