QUANTITATIVE METHODS AND PHENOTYPING IN ALCOHOL RESEARCH

University Of Pittsburgh At Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This competitive renewal of an NIAAA-funded Independent Scientist Award (K02) is designed to support career development in two related areas of alcohol studies: phenotyping alcohol disorders, and advanced methods in longitudinal statistics. This expertise will be applied to the applicant's funded R01 "Adolescent Alcohol Use Disorders: Nosology, Comorbidity and Course." This research involves longitudinal follow-ups across 5 years of 504 clinical adolescents who were extensively assessed at treatment entry, as well as a comparison group of 206 community teens. Career development skills also will be applied to collaborative research with consultants who study the genetics of alcoholism. The career development plan extends the focus of the original K02 from cross-sectional to longitudinal statistics. New career development activities in [unreadable] phenotyping will bridge the applicant's expertise in the nosology and clinical course of adolescent AUDs with attempts to understand the mechanisms in the inheritance of risk for alcohol disorders. Career development activities in quantitative methods will include tutorials, intensive workshops, and yearly visits to experts in longitudinal latent variable modeling and related analyses at the University of Virginia and UCLA. With regard to phenotyping, career development will include tutorials, directed readings, and collaborative research with investigators at the Missouri Alcohol Research Center, and the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism. Developmentally-relevant candidate phenotypes at the levels of symptoms, addiction constructs and alcohol disorders will be refined in the applicant's research study, and then applied to data sets from ongoing studies on the genetics of alcoholism. Phenotyping and longitudinal data analysis skills will be utilized to address the applicant's ongoing efforts to develop valid diagnostic criteria for adolescent alcohol dependence, to reformulate the problematic DSM-IV alcohol abuse category, and to understand alcohol disorders as they are manifested at the symptom level and by their clinical course over time. The continued support of this award will allow the applicant protected time to sustain a programmatic line of alcohol research over the long term. [unreadable] [unreadable]