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Religious attendance and frequency of alcohol use: same genes or same environments: a bivariate extended twin kinship
H H Maes1, M C Neale, N G Martin
1Virginia Institute for Psychiatric Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA. hmacs@vipbg.vcu.edu
Abstract:
Religious attendance has been shown to correlate negatively with alcohol use. We investigated whether this relationship is driven by genetic or environmental factors. Data on frequency of church attendance and frequency of alcohol use were obtained from twins and their families in the Virginia 30,000 study. A comprehensive bivariate model of family resemblance was fitted to the data using Mx. This model is described in detail. Results indicate that genetic factors primarily account for the relationship between alcohol and church attendance in males, whilst shared environmental factors, including cultural transmission and genotype-environment covariance, are stronger determinants of this association in females.