Addiction Blog

…Research on the inheritance of alcoholism has exploded since the 1970’s. The first , and still the best-known,research of this kind was conducted by D.Goodwich and his associates with Danish adoptees.They found that 18 percent of male adoptees with biological parents who were alcoholic became alcoholic themselves,compared with only 5 percent of male adoptees whose biological parents were not alcoholic. Taken the face value, this is probably the strongest evidence of the genetic inheritance of alcoholism in all the research on the subject .Yet it shows that the great majority (82%0 of men with alcoholic fathers do not become alcoholic solely by biological inheritance-that is ,when they are not directly exposed to their father’s influence.
This research shows that whatever genetic inheritance predisposes a man to alcoholism has only a weak link with the actual behavior that we call alcoholism.But the Goodwin research has an even more surprising message for daughters of alcoholics.Daughters who were raised away from alcoholic parents did not become alcoholic more often than female adoptees who did have alcoholic parents.To accept the Goodwin research, the research that established in many people’s minds that there is a genetic source of alcoholism, is to reject the idea that woman can inherit alcoholism!!!Other research confirms that alcoholism in women is hard to trace to genetic origins.But this raises an important question - if alcoholism is supposedly inherited, why is it only typed to one sex ?