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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Binge and heavy drinking may trigger a long-lasting genetic change, resulting in an even greater craving for alcohol, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
"We found that people who drink heavily may be changing their DNA in a way that makes them crave alcohol even more," said Distinguished Professor Dipak K. Sarkar, senior author of the study and director of the Endocrine Program in the Department of Animal Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "This may help explain why alcoholism is such a powerful addiction, and may one day contribute to new ways to treat alcoholism or help prevent at-risk people from becoming addicted."
In 2016, more than 3 million people died from the harmful use of alcohol, according a World Health Organization report. That is 5 percent of all global deaths. More than three-quarters of alcohol-caused deaths were among men. The harmful use of alcohol also caused 5.1 percent of the worldwide toll of disease and injuries.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Informative) by gringer on Thursday January 31 2019, @07:31AM (17 children)
For those wondering how alcohol changes DNA, it doesn't.
... at least not in this case.
... or at least not in the traditional way that people think of when they think about DNA being changed.
The change is in the methylation of DNA, a bit like giving DNA an armour upgrade, which is a well-established mechanism for adapting to intermediate-term environmental effects. Methylation is known to modify the expression of genes (i.e. how often they create stuff), but we don't know enough about how it works to be able to predict in a particular case whether methylation will increase or decrease gene expression. In this particular case, the researchers found that methylation of the PER2 and POMC genes reduced their expression.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @07:44AM (8 children)
So they didn't observe any "changing" after adopting drinking at all? They just measured methylation patterns in samples from people with a range of already established drinking habits?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 31 2019, @08:01AM (7 children)
Right. They should go and grab (or entice) healthy people to "Come and make a wreck from your and your family life by becoming an alcoholic, AC demands to see changes in the genes for reals".
Look, mate, you can still do astrophysics even if you aren't able to produce a neutron star on demand in your lab only to study/experiment with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:27AM (6 children)
Is this supposed to be sarcastic?
1) You think, if it is hard to do a study, they should just do something else and pretend they got the data they wanted.
2) Longitudinal studies are done all the time. It isn't actually difficult, eg take a blood sample when the cohort is out of high school and then another 10 yrs later. Some percent will have become drinkers. In fact this data probaly already exists somewhere.
Why are people so accepting of letting medical researchers get away with junk and misleading claims?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:18PM (5 children)
No, just crogmaloscent. What made you think otherwise?
First, I don't think. Or I don't think so.
Second:
Journal Reference: Omkaram Gangisetty, Rajita Sinha, Dipak K. Sarkar. Hypermethylation of Proopiomelanocortin and Period 2 Genes in Blood Are Associated with Greater Subjective and Behavioral Motivation for Alcohol in Humans.
I don't see what they pretend or what they wanted, I only see they are announcing [wiley.com] they discovered an association which allow the formulation of a hypothesis. To be more precise:
See? It seems to me you think too much and learn about too little about what they actually say.
---
Yeees, of course. The researchers have plenty of budget, both in money and time, to enrol and subsequently track a significant cohort - only a percentage will become alcoholics and AC will shirley ask for a statistically significant sample size.
And besides 10 years is such a short time and this world is so lacking perturbation factors that one can consider what we'll see only as a result of alcohol consumption. If not... well, just increase the cohort until the perturbation effects cancels out in averaging. Plenty of budget, remember?
---
Elementary, my dear AC. Because of you!
I mean, what's the point of duplicating your effort?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:30PM (4 children)
There is a direct quote in TFA:
It is clear what they actually believe is going on, and it isn't epigenetics -> drinking.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:34PM (1 child)
I'm seeing lotsa May and not a single Shirley in the quoted text.
Still hypothesis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:33PM
They are forced to give lip service to "may" and "suggests" because it is standard practice to include those qualifiers. They don't act according to that belief. If they did you would see equal attention given to other reasons for the correlation.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:19PM (1 child)
I understand that they believe their hypothesis. I don't understand why you think that is wrong. People who take a hypothesis seriously generally *do* believe it.
Now are you saying "This is really the claim of a firm confirmation of the hypothesis"? If so, I'll request some more explicit source. What it sounds to me as if they are saying is "After studying this we found these (listed) results, and guess that the cause is this particular reason." If you want more than that, you need to pay for additional studies and wait for them to finish...and that may be in process.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:53PM
It is simple correlation is not causation. There is no reason to favor their favorite interpretation of the correlation over the others...
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday January 31 2019, @07:56AM (5 children)
In other words, epigenetics.
A case of diet producing adaptation of the genetic engine, making the organism able to live with the new diet and (for this case) ask for more.
Not different from what I understand happens with the obese people: their organism adapted to higher food intake (or with the fast-food/sugary type) and sends signals "Hey, I can stand it. Go ahead".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:38AM (1 child)
...ago.
I seriously heard this exact talk about alcohol dependency while I was taking a second level psych course at community college. It might even have been on the news in those days. I remember it distinctly because a lot of family and friends were alcoholics including their offspring. This helped make clear both why that was as well as why those of us who had alcoholic/drug using parents had to be careful about falling into the same traps they did, whether psychological or physiological in nature.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday January 31 2019, @10:42PM
I've met a lot of people who never got into and stayed away from alcohol in large part due to the fact that their family had problems with it. Smoking cigarettes is probably difficult to do after you've seen granny's slow and painful suffocation into death from emphysema or lung cancer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:30AM (2 children)
No, the people were exposed to some stressor which lead to an epigenetic change, which lead to a tendency to drink more.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:20PM (1 child)
That's a reasonable alternative hypothesis. Got a study to back it up?
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:55PM
Sure, this one. The evidence supports either conclusion just as well.
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Thursday January 31 2019, @02:50PM (1 child)
So if this is a protective mechanism of DNA against environmental effects, a likely outcome of 'treating' it is that the DNA would be less protected from said environmental effects?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:22PM
Maybe. It could also reduce the desire to be exposed to the stimulus, and if the stimulus is damaging despite the protection (it is) then that might be less harmful. But this requires additional studies, because that's a separate question, and this study doesn't answer it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.