ArticlePsychological medicine2019
Evidence of causal effect of major depression on alcohol dependence: findings from the psychiatric genomics consortium.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 109 citations in OpenAlex.
- The impact of assortative mating, participation bias and socioeconomic status on the polygenic risk of behavioural and psychiatric traits.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
- Associations of common mental disorder with alcohol use in the adult general population: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2022Pooled it
- A systematic review of gene-by-intervention studies of alcohol and other substance use.Development and psychopathology · 2021Pooled it
- Using Mendelian randomization analysis to better understand the relationship between mental health and substance use: a systematic review.Psychological medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Metabolomics Profile in Depression: A Pooled Analysis of 230 Metabolic Markers in 5283 Cases With Depression and 10,145 Controls.Biological psychiatry · 2020Pooled it
- Decoding the serotonin-alcohol crosstalk: the role of central serotonergic dysregulation in alcohol use disorder.Pharmacological reports : PR · 2026Review
- Genetic pleiotropy differentially linking brain variation to cannabis use and cannabis use disorder.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Shared genetic architecture and neurobiological pathways of problematic alcohol use and anxiety disorders.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Sex differences in the genetic and causal relationships between depression, smoking, and alcohol use: the role of socioeconomic status.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- The causal interplay between depression and alcohol use from adolescence to young adulthood: a Mendelian randomization study.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Review
- Shared Genetic Architecture and Neurobiological Pathways of Problematic Alcohol Use and Anxiety Disorders.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Symptoms of problematic alcohol use differ in their genetic associations with comorbid internalizing, externalizing, and neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Genetic, psychological, and environmental factors are uniquely associated with onset of alcohol use in the adolescent brain cognitive development (ABCD) study.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Polygenic overlap of substance use behaviors and disorders with externalizing and internalizing problems independent of genetic correlations.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Indirect effects of perceived stress and depression on the relationship between insomnia symptoms and hazardous drinking.Alcohol (Fayetteville, N.Y.) · 2025Observational
- On the Detection of Population Heterogeneity in Causation Between Two Variables: Finite Mixture Modeling of Data Collected from Twin Pairs.Behavior genetics · 2025Article
- Suicide victims and alcohol-related consumption in Brazil: An observational study and a narrative review of the literature.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2024Observational
- Association between alcohol drinking frequency and depression among adults in the United States: a cross-sectional study.BMC psychiatry · 2024Article
- Associations between dairy and alcohol consumption and major depressive disorder in a mendelian randomization study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
11 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
24 authors at 11 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundDespite established clinical associations among major depression (MD), alcohol dependence (AD), and alcohol consumption (AC), the nature of the causal relationship between them is not completely understood. We leveraged genome-wide data from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) and UK Biobank to test for the presence of shared genetic mechanisms and causal relationships among MD, AD, and AC.
methodsLinkage disequilibrium score regression and Mendelian randomization (MR) were performed using genome-wide data from the PGC (MD: 135 458 cases and 344 901 controls; AD: 10 206 cases and 28 480 controls) and UK Biobank (AC-frequency: 438 308 individuals; AC-quantity: 307 098 individuals).
resultsPositive genetic correlation was observed between MD and AD (rgMD-AD = + 0.47, P = 6.6 × 10-10). AC-quantity showed positive genetic correlation with both AD (rgAD-AC quantity = + 0.75, P = 1.8 × 10-14) and MD (rgMD-AC quantity = + 0.14, P = 2.9 × 10-7), while there was negative correlation of AC-frequency with MD (rgMD-AC frequency = -0.17, P = 1.5 × 10-10) and a non-significant result with AD. MR analyses confirmed the presence of pleiotropy among these four traits. However, the MD-AD results reflect a mediated-pleiotropy mechanism (i.e. causal relationship) with an effect of MD on AD (beta = 0.28, P = 1.29 × 10-6). There was no evidence for reverse causation.
conclusionThis study supports a causal role for genetic liability of MD on AD based on genetic datasets including thousands of individuals. Understanding mechanisms underlying MD-AD comorbidity addresses important public health concerns and has the potential to facilitate prevention and intervention efforts.
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