Introduction to INIA
Alcohol abuse and alcoholism result from the complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Stress is a factor that is widely thought to contribute to excessive drinking, and alcoholism. One consequence of stressful experiences is anxiety, and there is a rich literature on the interactions between alcohol and anxiety.
While there is a great deal of evidence supporting stress-alcohol interactions, less is known about brain mechanisms at the molecular, cellular and systems levels that mediate stress effects which contribute to excessive drinking and alcoholism. In addition, it is not clear if and/or how genetic factors that contribute to excessive drinking interact with neural stress mechanisms.
In this Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism (INIA) we propose a multidisciplinary battery of experiments designed to explore the neural mechanisms that link stress, anxiety, and excessive alcohol intake. A common focus of many of the INIA studies is to discover and characterize the complex interactions of genetic and non-genetic factors that contribute to excessive drinking.
