'The largest and most ancestrally diverse study of smoking and drinking phenotypes' has gone through data from nearly 3.4 million people from various ethnic groups
The study on drinking and smoking involved almost 3.4 million people from diverse backgrounds, including African, American, East Asian and European ancestry. and identified more than 3,500 genetic variations that potentially affect smoking and drinking behaviour.
Despite the fact that both smoking and drinking are affected by environmental and social factors, evidence points to genetics as another underlying influence in tobacco and alcohol consumption.“We’re at a stage where genetic discoveries are being translated into clinical [applications],” says study co-author Dajiang Liu, a statistical geneticist at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The researchers came up with 3,823 genetic variants that were associated with smoking or drinking behaviours, 39 of which were linked with the age at which people took up smoking, 243 with the number of cigarettes smoked per day and 849 with the number of alcoholic drinks consumed per week. “We also find similar heritability estimates [for the traits] across the ancestries … suggesting that generally, the genetic architecture of these behaviours is similar across ancestries,” says Gretchen Saunders, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and co-author of the paper.
“Epigenetic and environmental factors are really important to turn off and turn on the genes. So maybe it’s because of that reason, there aren’t many [significant] differences,” adds Sehime Temel, who studies medical genetics at Bursa Uludag University, Türkiye.The analysis failed to incorporate people from Middle Eastern and Indian populations, where smoking is often prevalent.
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