Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESAssociation of the DRD4 Exon III Polymorphism With Smoking in Fifteen-Year-Olds: A Mediating Role for Novelty Seeking?
Section snippets
Participants
Participants in this investigation are members of the Mannheim Study of Risk Children, an ongoing prospective longitudinal study of the long-term outcome of early risk factors followed from birth to adolescence (Laucht et al., 2000). The sample consisted of an original cohort of 384 infants born between February 1, 1986, and February 28, 1988, who were recruited from two obstetric and six children's hospitals of the Rhine-Neckar Region of Germany. To be included in the study, parents and
Demographics
Demographic and clinical characteristics for male and female adolescents in the DRD4 7r groups are presented in Table 1. Results indicated that groups did not differ significantly regarding age, IQ, family adversity, and obstetric risk score. In addition, no significant differences according to gender were observed.
Association of DRD4 With Smoking and NS
Table 2 presents measures of smoking status for male and female adolescents in the DRD4 7r groups. Compared with data from a recent survey of smoking behavior in German adolescents (
DISCUSSION
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known, and tobacco use that begins in adolescence can become a serious addiction with long-term health consequences. This study indicates that genetic variation in the DRD4 gene may confer a risk for greater smoking activity during the early stages of smoking in adolescents. Fifteen-year-old males carrying the 7r allele of the exon III polymorphism had higher rates of lifetime smoking and smoking consumption and tend to be younger at their
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Disclosure: Drs. Becker and Schmidt currently receive research funding from Eli Lilly. Dr. Schmidt also receives research funding from Johnson & Johnson. The other authors have no financial relationships to disclose.
This study was supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (01EB0110), Baden-Wuerttemberg Consortium for Addiction Research. The authors thank the parents and children for their participation in the study and Ruth Berg and Sabine Eichenherr for their work in the lab.