Browsing by Author "Merikangas, Alison K."

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    The collaborative study on the genetics of alcoholism: Genetics
    (Wiley, 2023) Johnson, Emma C.; Salvatore, Jessica E.; Lai, Dongbing; Merikangas, Alison K.; Nurnberger, John I.; Tischfield, Jay A.; Xuei, Xiaoling; Kamarajan, Chella; Wetherill, Leah; COGA Collaborators; Rice, John P.; Kramer, John R.; Kuperman, Samuel; Foroud, Tatiana; Slesinger, Paul A.; Goate, Alison M.; Porjesz, Bernice; Dick, Danielle M.; Edenberg, Howard J.; Agrawal, Arpana; Medical and Molecular Genetics, School of Medicine
    This review describes the genetic approaches and results from the family-based Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA). COGA was designed during the linkage era to identify genes affecting the risk for alcohol use disorder (AUD) and related problems, and was among the first AUD-focused studies to subsequently adopt a genome-wide association (GWAS) approach. COGA's family-based structure, multimodal assessment with gold-standard clinical and neurophysiological data, and the availability of prospective longitudinal phenotyping continues to provide insights into the etiology of AUD and related disorders. These include investigations of genetic risk and trajectories of substance use and use disorders, phenome-wide association studies of loci of interest, and investigations of pleiotropy, social genomics, genetic nurture, and within-family comparisons. COGA is one of the few AUD genetics projects that includes a substantial number of participants of African ancestry. The sharing of data and biospecimens has been a cornerstone of the COGA project, and COGA is a key contributor to large-scale GWAS consortia. COGA's wealth of publicly available genetic and extensive phenotyping data continues to provide a unique and adaptable resource for our understanding of the genetic etiology of AUD and related traits.
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    The Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism: Overview
    (Wiley, 2023) Agrawal, Arpana; Brislin, Sarah J.; Bucholz, Kathleen K.; Dick, Danielle; Hart, Ronald P.; Johnson, Emma C.; Meyers, Jacquelyn; Salvatore, Jessica; Slesinger, Paul; COGA Collaborators; Almasy, Laura; Foroud, Tatiana; Goate, Alison; Hesselbrock, Victor; Kramer, John; Kuperman, Samuel; Merikangas, Alison K.; Nurnberger, John I.; Tischfield, Jay; Edenberg, Howard J.; Porjesz, Bernice; Medical and Molecular Genetics, School of Medicine
    Alcohol use disorders (AUD) are commonly occurring, heritable and polygenic disorders with etiological origins in the brain and the environment. To outline the causes and consequences of alcohol-related milestones, including AUD, and their related psychiatric comorbidities, the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) was launched in 1989 with a gene-brain-behavior framework. COGA is a family based, diverse (~25% self-identified African American, ~52% female) sample, including data on 17,878 individuals, ages 7-97 years, in 2246 families of which a proportion are densely affected for AUD. All participants responded to questionnaires (e.g., personality) and the Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics of Alcoholism (SSAGA) which gathers information on psychiatric diagnoses, conditions and related behaviors (e.g., parental monitoring). In addition, 9871 individuals have brain function data from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings while 12,009 individuals have been genotyped on genome-wide association study (GWAS) arrays. A series of functional genomics studies examine the specific cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying AUD. This overview provides the framework for the development of COGA as a scientific resource in the past three decades, with individual reviews providing in-depth descriptions of data on and discoveries from behavioral and clinical, brain function, genetic and functional genomics data. The value of COGA also resides in its data sharing policies, its efforts to communicate scientific findings to the broader community via a project website and its potential to nurture early career investigators and to generate independent research that has broadened the impact of gene-brain-behavior research into AUD.