Human dopamine {beta}-hydroxylase locus and the chromosome 9q34 region in alcoholism

Human dopamine {beta}-hydroxylase (DBH) is responsible for conversion of dopamine to norepinephrine in catecholamine neurons. Potential inhibitors of this enzyme do exist, but they are generally not effective in vivo in reducing tissue concentrations of catecholamines. The gene for DBH has been localized to 9q34 by linkage analysis and in situ hybridization. Recently there have been reports indicating a suggestive evidence of linkage between DNA markers in 9q34 region and alcoholism. In order to test for this suggestive linkage, we have genotyped a sample of 134 subjects with alcoholism, 30 alcoholic families (n=302) and 92 normal controls. The alcoholic subjects are probands of multiple incidence families. The normal controls are an epidemiologically ascertained samples of middle-aged, unrelated individuals. The two groups were matched for sex and ethnic background. The markers used in this study were dinucleotide repeats in the DBH gene, and two highly informative (CA) markers (D9S64, D9S66) flanking the DBH gene. A preliminary affected-sib-pair analysis was carried out under two diagnostic schemes. Regardless of whether `probable` alcoholics are classified as unaffected (t=0.63) or affected (t=1.50), these data do not reveal a significant excess in DBH marker sharing among affected-sib-pairs. However, the comparison of the DBH marker allele frequenciesmore » between the unrelated alcoholic panel and the unrelated normal control panel was significant at the p=0.04 level.« less