According to BBC news health report, a study published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal reports that a gene, namely RASGRF-2 is linked with heavy drinking habits.
A team from the King's College London found during a study that animals with the RASGRF-2 have a stronger desire for alcohol than the ones without that gene.
"If people have a genetic variation of the RASGRF-2 gene, alcohol gives them a stronger sense of reward, making them more likely to be heavy drinkers," said Gunter Schumann, who led the study at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, told Reuters.
The brain's dopamine systems are triggered by alcohol which encourages feelings of happiness and reward. Teens involved in alcohol abuse are more often linked to future health problems, poor brain development and antisocial behavior. According to a report in BBC News, in the U.K. annually there are about 5,000 teenagers admitted to hospitals for alcohol related problems.
"That is why identifying risk factors for early alcohol abuse is important in designing prevention and treatment interventions for alcohol addiction," professor Schumann told Metro news.
Scientists conducted a research on mice by removing the RASGRF-2 gene to observe the difference in alcohol consumption. Scientists concluded that the absence of RASGRF-2 gene was linked to significant reduction in alcohol consumption.
The team also studied the brain scan reports of 663 boys aged 14 years old and found that when awaiting a reward, there was significant activity found in an area of the brain which is linked to ventral tegmental area- that prevents brain from excessive release of dopamine and limits the sense of reward. Researchers contacted the same group of boys after two years and found that the boys with variation on the RASGRF-2 gene drank more often compared to other boys of same age without the RASGRF-2 gene.
"People seek out situations which fulfill their sense of reward and make them happy, so if your brain is wired to find alcohol rewarding, you will seek it out," Schumann said. "We now understand the chain of action: how our genes shape this function in our brains and how that, in turn, leads to human behavior."
