Showing posts with label women and alcohol. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women and alcohol. Show all posts

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Researchers Link Alcoholism and Binge Eating Behavior


Addiction and the role of genetic overlap.

More evidence has arrived, courtesy of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, demonstrating a genetic link between alcoholism and binge eating disorders.

In clinical practice, it is no secret that certain binge eaters and people with bulimia also show high rates of alcoholism. Various reasons have been suggested, but one of the obvious ones is that people prone to alcoholism are also genetically susceptible to certain kinds of eating disorders. A common set of genetic factors may convey these intertwined vulnerabilities to a subset of the population.

In order to examine the matter, Dr. Melissa Munn-Chernoff and coworkers followed the time-honored route: They studied twins, both identical and fraternal, from a database of 6,000 adult twins in Australia. Twin studies have been crucial to medical understanding of comorbid disorders and addiction. In general, while alcoholism and binge/purge disorders were seen as most likely genetic in origin, it was thought that the two disorders were transmitted in families independently. Writing in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, the researchers conclude that “in women, some of the genetic risk factors that influenced vulnerability to alcohol dependence also influenced vulnerability to both binge eating and compensatory behaviors [purging, laxatives, diuretics].”

Previous studies cited by the researchers have pegged the individual heritabilities of alcohol dependence (50-64 percent) and bulimia (28-83%). However, the question of genetic overlap had remained relatively underexplored. Munn-Chernoff and colleagues wanted to evaluate the links between alcohol dependence and binge eating behaviors in women. Among the study group, 6 percent of women had been dependent on alcohol at some point in their lives. As for binge eating, 13% of women had experienced problems with it. 14% of women had engaged in purging or laxative abuse.

The researchers judged the genetic correlation between the two disorders to be statistically relevant: “In women, the multivariate twin model suggested that additive genetic and nonshared environmental effects influenced alcohol dependence, binge eating, and compensatory behaviors, with heritability estimates ranging from 38% to 53%.”(For the specific statistical correlations, see the full-text article. The correlation was stronger for women than for men).

In addition, the study did not find any significant shared environmental influences contributing to covariance between alcoholism and binge behaviors.

Limitations of the study include an older age cohort (mean age 44 in women), higher alcoholism rates in the Australian sample compared with the U.S., and the possibility that other comorbidities, such as depression, might influence the association.

“It appears that some genes that influence alcohol dependence also influence binge eating in men and women,” said Melissa Munn-Chernoff, in a prepared statement. “When you go to an eating disorder treatment center, they don’t often ask questions about alcoholism. And when you go for alcoholism treatment, they don’t generally ask questions about eating disorder symptoms. If centers could be aware of that and perhaps treat both problems at the same time, that would be a big help.”

Women who abuse alcohol have it tough for any number of reasons, and this study gets at one of them: “A combination of pressures to adjust to the changing body at puberty, increased access to alcohol via peer networks, and genetic predispositions for eating disorder symptoms and alcohol problems could result in comorbid alcohol dependence and bulimia symptoms."

Munn-Chernoff M.A., Duncan A.E., Grant J.D., Wade T.D., Agrawal A., Bucholz K.K., Madden P.A.F., Martin N.G. & Heath A.C.  A twin study of alcohol dependence, binge eating, and compensatory behaviors., Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs,    PMID:


Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Women, Cigarettes, and Meth


More bad news for young female addicts.

A blizzard of research findings this year continues to demonstrate that women have gender-specific issues to deal with when it comes to cigarettes and speed. None of the findings have anything to do with the old canard that women cannot “hold their liquor,” or do drugs like men do. Women hold their liquor fine, on a pound for pound basis. And women are well represented, presently, among the ranks of alcoholics. That is unfortunate, since a great deal of research has shown that alcohol causes neurological damage in women more quickly than in men. And now comes more evidence that women don’t respond metabolically to cigarettes and speed the same as men, either.

Start with cigarettes: Women who begin smoking have a great risk of heart attack than men who take up the addiction—but scientists don’t know exactly why. Cardiovascular diseases remain the leading cause of female deaths in the developed world. One theory is that smoking lowers levels of “good” cholesterol more markedly in women than in men. This is not news, but preliminary research in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism now appears to show that teenaged girls in Australia were more sensitive to the effects of second-hand smoke than teenaged boys. If true, it could mean that “childhood passive smoke exposure may be a more significant cardiovascular risk factor for women than men,” lead author Chi Le-Ha said in a press release

And there’s more bad news: Research published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, suggests that women who continue to smoke during pregnancy increase the risk for obesity and diabetes in their unborn daughters. Kristin Mattsson of Lund University in Sweden, along with Matthew Longnecker and members of the National Institute on Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina, reported that data from the Medical Birth Register of Sweden showed that the risk (odds ratio) of gestational diabetes increased 52-62 per cent for women exposed to moderate or heavy smoking while in the womb. After adjusting the data for a host of outside factors, the researchers also concluded that women exposed to moderate amounts of smoking while in the womb were 36 per cent more likely to become obese, while the daughters of heavy smokers during pregnancy were 58 per cent more likely to be obese compared to non-smokers in the study.

Again, researchers are not quite sure what accounts for this effect. The researchers suggest a variety of possible answers: Alterations in appetite regulation, death of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, gene transcription changes causing the formation of fat cells, and epigenetic changes. But it may be that other factors—undetected differences in nutrition, extent of prenatal care, neglect, abuse, and many other variables—make it difficult to determine the major difference in outcomes between smoking and non-smoking families. Nailing down these risk factors becomes all the more important as young women in countries all around the world take up daily smoking in greater numbers than ever. The authors emphasize the importance of recognizing such long-term detrimental effects on offspring.

As for methamphetamine: A study in the Journal of Adolescent Health, conducted by the UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine, followed a group of adolescents in treatment for methamphetamine addiction. They found that girls were more likely to continue using meth during treatment than boys. Overall, boys returned twice as many meth-free urine samples as the girls in the program. Lead author Keith Heinzerling said in a prepared statement that the findings may have significant implications for treatment: “The greater severity of methamphetamine problems in adolescent girls compared to boys, combined with results of studies in adults that also found women to be more susceptible to methamphetamine than men, suggests that the gender differences in methamphetamine addiction observed in adults may actually begin in adolescence.” The small NIDA-funded study, involving only 19 teenagers, also found that the antidepressant Wellbutrin, used effectively in many smoking cessation programs, was not effective in curbing use among the teen meth addicts.
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