Abstract
Transmissible liability index (TLI), developed employing a high-risk design and item response theory, enables quantification of the latent trait of liability to drug use disorders (DUD) in children. TLI has been shown to have high heritability and predict DUD in young adulthood. This study extends prior research and determines the genetic contribution of DUD liability measured by TLI to adult liability as indexed by DUD diagnosis. The study utilizes data from a twin sample tracked from age 11 to age 25. In addition to confirming TLI’s high heritability and predictive validity, it shows that the genetic component of variance in TLI assessed in childhood accounts for over half of the genetic variance in DUD diagnosis and the entire phenotypic relationship between the two liability measures. This validates TLI as an early measure of DUD liability and supports its utility in early-age genetic and other mechanistic studies of DUD.
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Notes
In the NIMH approach, the neurobiological mechanisms are supposed to “inform” the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), which renders those mechanisms effectively subsumed under the RDoC. In the liability index approach, as employed, e.g., in the development of TLI, the phenotype remains at the same psychological/behavioral level of biological organization as the disorder diagnosis, which allows studying mechanisms as independent variables while augmenting the diagnostic classification.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse Grant P50DA005605.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent
All procedures performed were approved by the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board and are in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. All participants provided informed consent.
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Edited by Stacey Cherny.
Kevin Kim—Deceased.
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Vanyukov, M., Kim, K., Irons, D. et al. Genetic Relationship Between the Addiction Diagnosis in Adults and Their Childhood Measure of Addiction Liability. Behav Genet 45, 1–11 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-014-9684-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-014-9684-4