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posted by mrpg on Thursday January 31 2019, @07:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the alcohol-as-a-parasite dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday January 31 2019, @08:01AM (7 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 31 2019, @08:01AM (#794447) Journal

    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
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:27AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @11:27AM (#794487)

    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)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:18PM (#794492) Journal

      Is this supposed to be sarcastic?

      No, just crogmaloscent. What made you think otherwise?

      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.

      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:

      Background
      Epigenetic modifications of a gene have been shown to play a role in maintaining a longā€lasting change in gene expression. We hypothesize that alcohol's modulating effect on DNA methylation on certain genes in blood is evident in binge and heavy alcohol drinkers and is associated with alcohol motivation.
      ...
      Conclusions
      These data establish significant association between binge or heavy levels of alcohol drinking and elevated levels of methylation and reduced levels of expression of POMC and PER2 genes. Furthermore, elevated methylation of POMC and PER2 genes is associated with greater subjective and behavioral motivation for alcohol.

      See? It seems to me you think too much and learn about too little about what they actually say.

      ---

      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.

      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?

      ---

      Why are people so accepting of letting medical researchers get away with junk and misleading claims?

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:30PM (#794497)

        There is a direct quote in TFA:

        "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."

        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)

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 31 2019, @12:34PM (#794500) Journal

          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

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @01:33PM (#794510)

            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)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:19PM (#794594) Journal

          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

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:53PM (#794647)

            It is simple correlation is not causation. There is no reason to favor their favorite interpretation of the correlation over the others...