A new study has found that there is a strong link between parental Alcohol Use Disorders (AUDs) and the risk for developing an AUD among their offspring.

Findings confirmed that parental AUDs were associated with an increased risk of AUDs among the offspring.

It showed that parental AUDs were associated with an increased risk of AUDs among the offspring, independent of other significant predictors such as gender, parental social status, and parental psychiatric hospitalization with other diagnoses. This association, according to the researchers appeared to be stronger among female than male offspring, which suggests that inherited factors related to AUDs are at least as important among daughters as among sons. Early studies suggested that a genetic load played a stronger role in males than in females.