The program of research described in this application uses measures of sleep, arousal, pubertal timing, and family history of alcohol dependence to examine developmental trajectories from childhood affective disorders to adolescent alcohol problems. It is hypothesized that an altered pattern of sleep/arousal regulation in children with anxiety and affective disorders will predict elevated rates of alcohol abuse/dependence during clinical follow-up across late-adolescence and into early adulthood. This work builds upon an existing psychobiologic study where a broad range of biological, clinical, and family history data have been obtained in samples of children with depression, anxiety disorders, controls with high family loading for affective disorders, and low-risk controls. The investigations described in the current proposal will add a new set of measures and analyses to that existing study, in order to address key questions relevant to adolescent development, sleep and arousal regulation, and pathways to alcohol abuse/dependence into early adulthood. These new measures will include multi variate EEG analyses applied to previously collected sleep data. Subjects (n=367) had psychobiologic measures obtained at ages 8-14 years of age and will be followed longitudinally for alcohol use problems developing across adolescence. The study will also examine gender differences and the influence of early pubertal timing on the development of affective and alcohol disorders. The study will obtain new biologic data on an informative sub-sample of subjects (n=90) studied in later pubertal maturation (ages 14-21). The long-term goal of this research is to understand maturational changes in sleep, arousal, and affect regulation across adolescence relevant to the development of alcohol abuse and dependence. Advancing knowledge in these areas may lead to more effective early intervention strategies (prevention or early treatment) for alcohol abuse/dependence in targeted high-risk populations of youth.
| Dahl, Ronald E; Williamson, Douglas E; Bertocci, Michele A et al. (2003) Spectral analyses of sleep EEG in depressed offspring of fathers with or without a positive history of alcohol abuse or dependence: a pilot study. Alcohol 30:193-200 |
