2014 — 2016 |
Vrieze, Scott Ian |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Social Media, Online Measures, and Substance Use Development in Adolescent Twins
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many individuals, and especially adolescents, use one or more forms of social media. Social media companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Pinterest, and Yahoo! do not provide outsiders with access to social media usage data, to protect user privacy and commercial interests. Even if one works for a large social media company, analyses of user activity across the boundaries of different sites are challenging or impossible. Investigating social media behavior and how it affects health behavior, including substance use and dependence, will benefit from studies that transcend social media boundaries. It also requires individual-level knowledge of participant behavior, health, and environmental context, which are difficult or impossible to obtain without individual-level clinical assessment. As such, it is currently unknown if and how social media exposure may relate to substance use and dependence, how this relationship evolves during adolescence, or the etiological sources of individual differences in this relationship. The present application is positioned to address this broad question through a combination of novel technology and standard in-person clinical assessment, all applied to a sample of adolescent twins from Colorado. The application will integrate in-person clinical, cognitive, and environmental assessment, online longitudinal surveys of the same, geospatial position logging, and monitoring of online and social media behavior. With these data, we will 1) monitor social media use and exposure for 400 adolescent twin pairs for a full year; 2) link aspects of social media behavior in these 400 twin pairs to known and validated in-person assessments of behavioral disinhibition, substance use and dependence, and environmental risk for substance use; and 3) evaluate the extent to which social media, GPS, and online monitoring can provide novel, accurate, and highly efficient assessments of substance use/dependence, behavioral disinhibition, and environmental risk factors for substance use/dependence. After validating the online data collection measures, we will test for longitudinal associations between indicators of social media use (e.g., duration of use, posting/reading/searching for drug- related content) and substance use, utilizing the twin design to parse the genetic and environmental contributions to these associations.
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0.961 |
2015 — 2019 |
Vrieze, Scott Ian |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Genetic Association Meta-Analyses of Smoking and Drinking For the Sequencing Age @ University of Minnesota
? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alcohol and tobacco use and addiction are leading causes of morbidity and mortality in the USA and worldwide. These behaviors do not occur in isolation. Individuals who drink alcohol excessively are much more likely to smoke, and those who smoke are more likely to drink, with family studies consistently finding that genetic predispositions contribute to these relationships. Inherited genetic variation plays a substantial role in these behaviors with genome-wide association meta-analyses detecting >10 loci associated with heaviness of smoking, smoking initiation and cessation, alcohol use, or alcohol dependence. Such studies have discovered small individual effects of common genetic variants on these complex behaviors, with no variants clearly affecting both smoking and drinking. Much larger samples are now available to discover additional common and rare loci associated with smoking and drinking behavior to provide insight into the biological bases of these behaviors. To do this, we have formed a consortium of many large participating studies with existing study samples. We will finely map the genome with improved imputation, rare variant genotyping arrays, and whole genome sequencing to provide the genomic resolution necessary to identify rare and common variants that contribute to smoking and alcohol use, as well as disentangle competing genetic mechanisms. We will develop novel methods to test for shared genetic etiology, or pleiotropy, to directly test whether any particular locus influences both smoking and drinking, and contributes to the correlation between these behaviors. Finally, we will functionally annotate these dense genomic maps to characterize the nature of discovered loci. The results of this project will stimulate a wide range of follow-up experiments to characterize discovered loci.
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1 |
2017 — 2021 |
Hewitt, John K. Hopfer, Christian J [⬀] Mcgue, Matthew K. (co-PI) [⬀] Vrieze, Scott Ian |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Impact of Marijuana Legalization: Comparison of Two Longitudinal Twin Cohorts @ University of Colorado Denver
PROJECT ABSTRACT We propose to examine the impact of recreational marijuana legalization on the development of marijuana use and marijuana use disorders, alcohol, nicotine, and other substance use and use disorders, and associated psychological adjustment and psychopathology. To do this, we will compare outcomes in two population based twin samples that have been followed longitudinally for over 15 years since adolescence. The age ranges of the samples at will be 23-39 at their follow-up assessment, thus, we will be able to examine the impact of legalization on early- to mid-adulthood functioning of family formation, work engagement, and adult role fulfillment. We will obtain additional waves of data in these samples in order to examine the effect of legalization on rates of marijuana, alcohol and other substance use and use disorders as well as associated psychological adjustment and psychopathology. One of these samples is from Colorado, which legalized adult recreational marijuana use in 2014 and now has widespread commercial marijuana readily available to consumers. The other sample is from Minnesota, which in 2014 legalized medical marijuana, with very strict limits on access, and has no recreational legalization. Together with our detailed prior longitudinal data, the new assessments, post-legalization of substance use, psychopathology, and psychosocial functioning in over 5000 population-based adult twins will provide unique and powerful data to understand the impact of recreational marijuana legalization and marijuana use on a wide variety of important outcomes. Furthermore, the effect of recreational marijuana legalization is unlikely to be uniform across the population. Rather, some individuals will be at higher risk to suffer negative consequences of RML, such as increased use and dependence. Leveraging the longitudinal and twin structure of the study, we will be able to determine the influence of pre-legalization individual differences in behavioral risk and psychosocial function on the effect of recreational marijuana legalization.
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0.943 |
2018 — 2021 |
Friedman, Naomi P. (co-PI) [⬀] Vrieze, Scott Ian |
U01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
A Twin Study of Adolescent Alcohol and Drug Use Development: Leveraging Intensive Longitudinal Assessments @ University of Minnesota
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Taken together, alcohol and drug use account for more morbidity and mortality than any single disease or disorder in the United States. Rates of substance use are highest among older adolescents and younger adults, which are critical developmental windows for the development of addiction. The combined factors of sensation seeking versus behavioral and cognitive control are underdeveloped in adolescence. Under popular models of adolescent use, such as the dual systems model, these two systems are hypothesized to explain developmental trends in adolescent substance use. More recently, such theories have incorporated the potential impact of social context, including deviant peers, as accentuating sensation seeking and reward systems in adolescents and contributing to their increased risk of substance use and dependence. To date, these developmental models have been tested and characterized primarily in cross-sectional studies or longitudinal studies with, at best, annual assessments. Here, we will use smartphone sensors and weekly surveys to assess substance use, executive function, disinhibition, risk-taking, and social context on a quasi-continuous basis over the course of multiple years in a large sample during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. The results will provide a fine-grained model of developmental change in key risk domains and their relationship to substance use. Instrument variables derived from the smartphone's GPS, camera, and microphone, combined with an adolescent twin study design, will provide stringent tests of whether and how environmental and social context disrupts normative developmental trends.
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1 |
2019 — 2021 |
Vrieze, Scott Ian |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Deep Sequencing, Phenotyping, and Imputation in Large-Scale Biobanks: a Novel and Cost-Effective Framework to Identify Rare Mutations Associated With Addiction @ University of Minnesota
Project Summary/Abstract Drug and alcohol use and addiction are heritable phenotypes that are leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Hundreds of loci have now been strongly linked to risk for substance use and addiction, and many more genes remain to be discovered. Studies of impactful rare genetic variants are accelerating our understanding of genetic influences of complex disease and producing compelling targets for intervention research and drug development. The current proposal provides a framework by which rare variants can be efficiently identified and evaluated in humans for their effects on addiction using large and readily available datasets. Such datasets often have sparse phenotyping, especially for behavioral and psychiatric phenotypes. Our proposed framework overcomes this challenge through re-contact and reassessment of rare variant carriers and their family members, allowing measurement of psychiatric phenotypes far beyond that available in biobanks. We take full advantage of a multidisciplinary team, advanced genomic technology, diverse analytical approaches, and detailed deep phenotypic assessment on a sample of large extended families. We will use large highly-powered GWAS and whole genome sequencing datasets to identify rare putatively deleterious variants within substance-use-associated loci. Upon functional validation of the rare deleterious variant in cell lines, we will use a novel procedure to impute such variants into the Michigan Genomics Initiative Biobank, thereby identifying carriers of rare deleterious alleles. These individuals, and their families, will be re-contacted and receive standard and tailored assessments of their substance use/dependence history, psychiatric, neurocognitive, and psychosocial function. The proposed framework offers a new approach to investigate the human biology underlying GWAS hits, identifying therapeutic targets and improving our understanding of the etiology of addiction.
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1 |
2020 — 2021 |
Luciana, Monica [⬀] Vrieze, Scott Ian |
T32Activity Code Description: To enable institutions to make National Research Service Awards to individuals selected by them for predoctoral and postdoctoral research training in specified shortage areas. |
Training in Genetic and Neurobehavioral Mechanisms of Addiction @ University of Minnesota
Project Summary Substance use disorders are increasingly described as highly heritable and brain-based. Preclinical work has established that deviations in subcortical and frontal networks are associated with progression from experimentation to use to compulsive drug-seeking, to cycles of abstinence and relapse. Current models emphasize the importance of genetic vulnerabilities to intermediate phenotypes that predispose to substance use and dependence, including neural mechanisms of behavioral disinhibition, reward valuation, negative reinforcement, and negative affect that exacerbates withdrawal/craving. These models also emphasize how such mechanisms might be differentially impacted as a function of neurodevelopment. These various mechanisms, their neural correlates and genetic underpinnings, are increasingly being investigated in the context of large consortium efforts using novel technologies such as the ABCD study, various arms of the Human Connectome Project, TOPMed, AllofUS, and the UK Biobank, to name a few. However, today?s students are not necessarily prepared to leverage these resources to advance the field. We propose a mixed predoctoral/postdoctoral training program, with a central focus on neurobehavioral measures (e.g., neuroimaging), genetically informative designs, and cutting edge quantitative methods to uncover and characterize neurobehavioral mechanisms in the development of addiction. The University of Minnesota is a leader in the investigation of behavioral and molecular genetics of addiction, neurobehavioral mechanisms of substance abuse and its development through the use of preclinical, pharmacological, and neuroimaging techniques, and in quantitative modeling. Led by co-PDs Luciana and Vrieze and with the goal of producing the next generation of scientific/academic leaders, the proposed training program will train six predoctoral and three postdoctoral students each year in quantitative methods and the genetics and/or neurobehavioral mechanisms of addiction. A diverse group of trainees will be selected using stringent criteria from the pool of graduate students (predoctoral) as well as nationally (postdoctoral). The University of Minnesota?s Department of Psychology will lead this effort, with the support of an interdisciplinary team of 19 mentors in addition to the PDs. Each trainee will be funded for a two-year period, will be co-mentored by scientists with topical as well as quantitative expertise, and will pursue a combination of didactic training, lab- based experiences, workshops, seminars focused on professional development, and training in research ethics. For each trainee, individualized development plans will be developed and reviewed by a Steering Committee with articulated milestones related to training in specific research methods and the dissemination of findings. Accordingly, the proposed program will uniquely advance addiction science through its emphasis on computational/quantitative modeling of genetic and neurobehavioral factors relevant to addiction.
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1 |