Maternal half-sibling families with discordant fathers: a contrastive design assessing cross-generational paternal genetic transmission of alcohol use disorder, drug abuse and major depression.

ABSTRACT:

Background

We introduce and apply an elegant, contrastive genetic-epidemiological design - Maternal Half-Sibling Families with Discordant Fathers - to clarify cross-generational transmission of genetic risk to alcohol use disorder (AUD), drug abuse (DA) and major depression (MD).

Method

Using Swedish national registries, we identified 73 108 eligible pairs of reared together maternal half-siblings and selected those whose biological fathers were discordant for AUD, DA and MD, and had minimal contact with the affected father. We examined differences in outcome in half-siblings with an affected v. unaffected father.

Results

For AUD, DA and MD, the HR (95% confidence intervals) for the offspring of affected v. unaffected fathers were, respectively, 1.72 (1.61; 1.84), 1.5

SUBMITTER: Kendler KS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6800743 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature