ArticleAddiction biology2023
Analysis of the brain transcriptome for substance-associated genes: An update on large-scale genome-wide association studies.
Article in Addiction biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genome-wide association studies of lifetime and frequency of cannabis use in 131,895 individuals.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Genotype-by-sex interaction analyses for alcohol use disorder across biobanks.Alcohol, clinical & experimental research · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Substance use disorder (SUD) arises from the initiation to subsequent regular, irregular and harmful use of substances such as alcohol, tobacco/nicotine and cannabis. While thousands of genetic variants have been identified from recent large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS), understanding their functions in substance involvement and investigating the mechanisms by which they act in the addiction circuits remains challenging. In this study, we re-analysed the brain regional transcriptome data from the most comprehensive postmortem transcriptomic study, with a focus on up- or down-regulation of substance-associated protein-coding genes in the addiction circuit-related brain regions (AddictRegions), including six cortical and 11 subcortical regions. We found that substance-associated genes were overrepresented in AddictRegions. Interestingly, we observed a greater degree of genetic overlap between initiation and use and between use and SUD than between initiation and SUD. Moreover, substance initiation, use and SUD-associated genes tend to shift their enriched AddictRegions from the cortical for initiation and, to a lesser extent, substance use to subcortical regions for SUD (e.g., thalamus, substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area). We also uncovered a pattern of coordinated cortical up-regulation and subcortical down-regulation for the genes associated with tobacco initiation and alcohol use. Moreover, the Gene Ontology terms of glutamate receptor activity and neurotransmitter binding were most significantly overrepresented in AddictRegion-upregulated, substance-associated genes, with the strongest enrichment for those involved in common substance use behaviours. Overall, our analysis provides a resource of AddictRegion-related transcriptomes for studying substance-associated genes and generates intriguing insights into the genetic control of substance initiation, use and SUD.
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Registered trials
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