There are estimated to be 22 million adult children of alcoholics in the U.S.. There is still a pressing need to explore some under- researched areas in this field, particularly those involving women with alcoholic fathers. Previous epidemiologic research on adults at risk for psychiatric disorders has largely focussed on men with a history of parental alcoholism, while neglecting their sisters' outcome. We plan to take advantage of an already existing data-set to do a secondary analysis of a large community sample of 5354 individuals, including like-sex and unlike-sex pairs of adult twins from Australia. This project will capitalize on the special advantages of twins including: twice the number of informants, identical age, shared familial environment, similar length of exposure to parental psychopathology, and good concordance across sibling reports of paternal problems with alcohol. This proposed study will examine the following issues: (a) the relation between women's psychopathology and perceived paternal alcoholism; (b)the relation between perceived paternal alcoholism and differences in psychiatric outcomes between twin siblings of opposite gender; (c) the interaction between perceived paternal alcoholism and perceived maternal depression; and (d) the association between perceived paternal alcoholism and severity of alcohol dependence in adult women. Outcome measures will include psychiatric diagnoses of alcohol dependence, depression, and social phobia, made on the subjects assessed with the modified version of the Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics of Alcoholism. This proposed study extends the P.I.'s prior research on adult children of alcoholics.
