HUMAN DOPAMINE TRANSPORTER GENE POLYMORPHISM (VNTR) AND ALCOHOLISM

The dopamine transporter (DAT1) is responsible for taking released dop amine back up into presynaptic terminals and terminating dopaminergic activity. It has been shown that cocaine binds to the dopamine transpo rter and blocks dopamine reuptake in a fashion that correlates with co caine reward and reinforcement, To determine the role of this gene in the development of alcoholism, we have used two approaches, relative r isk and haplotype relative risk. The relative risk approach involved 1 62 alcoholic probands who were categorized into type I and type II, an d 89 unrelated normal controls, In the haplotype relative risk approac h, 29 trios (father, mother, and proband) were genotyped with dopamine transporter gene polymorphism, Comparison of allele frequencies betwe en total alcoholics, subtypes of alcoholics, and normal controls were negative, The results of haplotype relative risk, differences between alleles transmitted and nontransmitted, were also negative, However, b oth approaches produced similar results, Therefore, we concluded that the VNTR polymorphism in DAT1 gene is not associated with alcoholism s usceptibility genes in our samples. (C) 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.