86 research outputs found
Visual P3a in Male Subjects at High Risk for Alcoholism
Background: Voltage of the P300 component of eventrelated
potentials (ERPs) has been proposed as a phenotypic
marker of risk for alcoholism. P3a elicited by
intrusive events is important in the context of deficits in
inhibition found during psychophysiological and behavioral
evaluations in children of alcoholics.
Methods: ERPs were recorded from a group of adult
children of alcoholics (n 5 26) and controls (n 5 23) with
a three-stimulus visual oddball paradigm. The task required
a difficult perceptual discrimination between a
frequent (.80) vertical line and an infrequent (.10) 2° tilted
line (target). An easily discriminable nontarget infrequent
horizontal line also occurred (.10). Subjects were required
to press a button to the target. P3a was compared using
mixed-model ANCOVAs at 31 sites organized in 5 scalp
regions. Current source density (CSD) maps were also
analyzed.
Results: High-risk (HR) subjects manifested reduced P3a
amplitudes compared to controls at frontal, central, parietal,
and temporal electrodes. CSD analyses supported
these findings with group differences found for all the
scalp regions.
Conclusions: The results are discussed in relation to
previous HR studies. P3a reductions may be related to
deficits in neuronal inhibition during stimulus processing.
These results suggest that P3a amplitude may be important
as a marker for vulnerability to alcoholism.This research was supported by NIH Grants AA08401 and AA08403. Dr. Holguin is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, State University of New York Health Science Center, supported by the Galician Government Research Authority (DOG 08/26/1997)S
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Defining alcohol-related phenotypes in humans. The Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism.
Alcoholism is a disease that runs in families and results at least in part from genetic risk factors. The Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) is a Federally funded effort to identify and characterize those genetic factors. The study involves more than 1,000 alcoholic subjects and their families, with researchers conducting comprehensive psychological, physiological, electrophysiological, and genetic analyses of the participants. These analyses have identified several traits, or phenotypes, that appear to be genetically determined, such as the presence of alcohol dependence, the level of response to alcohol, the presence of coexisting depression, or the maximum number of drinks a person consumes per occasion. Genetic analyses have identified regions on several chromosomes that are associated with these phenotypes and need to be studied further
Description of the data from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) and single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping for Genetic Analysis Workshop 14
The data provided to the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 (GAW 14) was the result of a collaboration among several different groups, catalyzed by Elizabeth Pugh from The Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR) and the organizers of GAW 14, Jean MacCluer and Laura Almasy. The DNA, phenotypic characterization, and microsatellite genomic survey were provided by the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), a nine-site national collaboration funded by the National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) with the overarching goal of identifying and characterizing genes that affect the susceptibility to develop alcohol dependence and related phenotypes. CIDR, Affymetrix, and Illumina provided single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping of a large subset of the COGA subjects. This article briefly describes the dataset that was provided
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