Molecular Psychiatry: Adolescent alcohol use: an interaction of parenting and dopamine D2 genotype?

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Adolescent alcohol use: an interaction of parenting and dopamine D2 genotype?

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Molecular Psychiatry advance online publication 24 February 2009; doi: 10.1038/mp.2009.4

Interaction between dopamine D2 receptor genotype and parental rule-setting in adolescent alcohol use: evidence for a gene-parenting interaction

C S van der Zwaluw¹, R C M E Engels¹, A A Vermulst¹, B Franke^2,3, J Buitelaar³, R J Verkes³ and R H J Scholte¹

Behavioral Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Department of Human Genetics, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Department of Psychiatry, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Donders Centre for Neuroscience, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Correspondence: CS van der Zwaluw, Behavioral Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail: C.vanderZwaluw@bsi.ru.nl

Received 22 September 2008; Revised 3 December 2008; Accepted 18 December 2008; Published online 24 February 2009.

Abstract

Association studies investigating the link between the dopamine D2 receptor gene (DRD2) and alcohol (mis)use have shown inconsistent results. This may be due to lack of attention for environmental factors. High levels of parental rule-setting are associated with lower levels of adolescent alcohol use and delay of initiation of drinking. We tested whether DRD2 TaqI A (rs1800497) genotype interacts with alcohol-specific parenting practices in predicting the uptake of regular adolescent alcohol use. Non-regular drinkers were selected from a Dutch, nationwide sample of 428 adolescents (mean age 13.4 years at baseline) and participated in a prospective, community-based study with three annual waves. Parental rule-setting was directly and inversely related to adolescent alcohol use over time. For DRD2 genotype no significant main effect was found. DRD2 genotype interacted with parental rule-setting on adolescent alcohol use over time: adolescents, with parents highly permissive toward alcohol consumption and carrying a genotype with the DRD2 A1 (rs1800497T) allele, used significantly more alcohol over time than adolescents without these characteristics. The DRD2 genotype may pose an increased risk for alcohol use and abuse, depending on the presence of environmental risk factors, such as alcohol-specific parenting.

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My latest editorial - May 2009

Update on Molecular Psychiatry:
New publication guidelines and new ways to stay current

The field of molecular psychiatry has evolved considerably from when Molecular Psychiatry was launched in 1996. We present here brief and updated guidelines for publication as well as details on two innovative electronic resources – our blog and twitter.

We now receive over 700 manuscripts annually and can only publish a very small fraction of what we receive. In the light of the resulting high rejection rate, I am often asked what type of paper has the highest likelihood of acceptance. Here are some guidelines on the content and format that can lead to the highest likelihood of success.

On the important point of content, we seek work that is either conceptually novel or persuasively conclusive and that advances the field. Given the growth of approaches in psychiatric research, we are very open to the most diverse range of papers: from the epidemiological all the way to the most fundamental basic science, including in that broad range all aspects of translational and clinical research, pharmacology, genetics, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, imaging, behavior, and animal-model research. I cannot think of an innovative, ground breaking or conclusive paper relevant to psychiatry that we would not be interested in. What is important is not so much the area, but either innovation and conceptual novelty or a definitive study that provides conclusive evidence.

Regarding format: because of the tremendous pressure on our space, brevity is encouraged. Most scientific work can benefit from a careful format and style revision aimed at achieving maximum clarity and brevity. Frankly, while your own story may be captivating to you, neither reviewers nor readers have the time or the disposition to go through pages and pages of details or speculation. Please build your paper around data and provide a succinct description of what led you to collect those data, including the guiding hypotheses and methods used, and then provide a brief discussion of your results in the context of where that particular area of research is now and where it is going. We will not publish your article if your results cannot speak for themselves and you need thousands of words of introduction and discussion to highlight them.

One of our goals has been to foster dialogue in the field. Originally, that occurred in our Letters to the Editor and News & Commentary sections. However, the competition for our space makes the fostering of such dialogue increasingly difficult, as it is hard to justify rejecting a highly meritorious paper for lack of space as we dedicate space to interesting, but not critical, correspondence. Furthermore, there is now an increasing discrepancy between the immediacy of electronic publishing and the time constraints of print. In order to facilitate a dialogue in the field and to rapidly alert authors to emerging articles, I am personally creating two new resources for the field that will be mostly related to Molecular Psychiatry, but will occasionally include updates, news, and comments on other material that is of relevance to our field. Those resources are a new Molecular Psychiatry blog and a twitter.

The Molecular Psychiatry blog can be found at http://molecularpsychiatry.blogspot.com. In this blog we will give authors the option to provide summaries of their papers with links to the journal site containing the full article. Those summaries would appear in the blog in conjunction with Advance Online Publication. A dialogue around the paper and its subject matter can then rapidly develop in real-time with comments, questions and answers from the scientific community at large. Authors are not required to respond to comments, but may do so if they feel appropriate. As a safety measure, I will moderate this blog; therefore, material will only be posted with my approval. This will protect authors from inappropriate comments or nuisance. Having grown up in a military dictatorship that enforced official censorship of the press, I have a heartfelt commitment to freedom of speech and will only screen out truly inappropriate blog submissions. Authors and the public can e-mail me if they think that my screening is inappropriate. It is hoped that the blog will foster a lively real-time dialogue that will energize authors and readers.

Our second outreach innovation will be through twitter. For those interested in twittering on Molecular Psychiatry, just go into your twitter account and search for “Julio Licinio.” Subscribe to my open twitter and as any exciting development emerges in Molecular Psychiatry or in other publications, I will twitter about those. For my older colleagues who do not know what twitter is, please get a tutorial from your children, grandchildren, or young relatives, students, or anyone under 30. You can also go to http://www.twitter.com. Briefly, by subscribing to twitter you can tell others or hear from others what is happening now. I am using my twitter to rapidly disseminate exciting emerging data with relevant weblinks. The beauty of twitter is that each message can have a maximum of 140 characters. Those brief notifications are sufficient to keep you in touch with the latest findings, without the unnecessary distraction that would be caused by lengthy texts. I will mostly twitter take-home summaries of interesting papers as soon as they come out in Molecular Psychiatry online (ahead of print). Occasional twitters of groundbreaking work in the field, published elsewhere, will also be sent out – in moderation – as alerts of critical new data, without overwhelming your mailboxes.

Julio Licinio
Editor

Molecular Psychiatry

WELCOME

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Adolescent alcohol use: an interaction of parenting and dopamine D2 genotype?