Abstract

BACKGROUND
Previous studies examined caffeine use and caffeine dependence and risk for the symptoms, or diagnosis, of psychiatric disorders. The current study aimed to determine if generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, phobias, major depressive disorder (MDD), anorexia nervosa (AN), or bulimia nervosa (BN) shared common genetic or environmental factors with caffeine use, caffeine tolerance, or caffeine withdrawal.
METHOD
Using 2,270 women from the Virginia Adult Twin Study of Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders, bivariate Cholesky decomposition models were used to determine if any of the psychiatric disorders shared genetic or environmental factors with caffeine use phenotypes.
RESULTS
GAD, phobias, and MDD shared genetic factors with caffeine use, with genetic correlations estimated to be 0.48, 0.25, and 0.38, respectively. Removal of the shared genetic and environmental parameter for phobias and caffeine use resulted in a significantly worse fitting model. MDD shared unique environmental factors (environmental correlation=0.23) with caffeine tolerance; the genetic correlation between AN and caffeine tolerance and BN and caffeine tolerance were 0.64 and 0.49, respectively. Removal of the genetic and environmental correlation parameters resulted in significantly worse fitting models for GAD, phobias, MDD, AN, and BN, which suggested that there was significant shared liability between each of these phenotypes and caffeine tolerance. GAD had modest genetic correlations with caffeine tolerance, 0.24, and caffeine withdrawal, 0.35.
CONCLUSIONS
There was suggestive evidence of shared genetic and environmental liability between psychiatric disorders and caffeine phenotypes. This might inform us about the etiology of the comorbidity between these phenotypes.

Links

Publisher Full Text

Authors

Bergin JE, Kendler KS

Institution

Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23298, USA. jdellava@vcu.edu

Source

Twin research and human genetics : the official journal of the International Society for Twin Studies 15:4 2012 Aug pg 473-82

MeSH

Adult
Anorexia Nervosa
Anxiety Disorders
Bulimia
Caffeine
Depressive Disorder, Major
Diseases in Twins
Female
Gene-Environment Interaction
Humans
Panic Disorder
Phenotype
Phobic Disorders
Registries
Risk Factors
Substance Withdrawal Syndrome
Substance-Related Disorders
Virginia

Pub Type(s)

Journal Article
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Twin Study

Language

eng

PubMed ID

22854069