What are the causes and symptoms of alcoholism?
There are probably a number of factors that work together to cause a person to become an alcoholic. Recent genetic studies have demonstrated that close relatives of an alcoholic are four times more likely to become alcoholics themselves. Furthermore, this risk holds true even for children who were adopted away from their biological families at birth and raised in a non-alcoholic adoptive family, with no knowledge of their biological family’s difficulties with alcohol. More research is being conducted to determine if genetic factors could account for differences in alcohol metabolism that may increase the risk of an individual becoming an alcoholic. The symptoms of alcoholism can be broken down into two major categories: symptoms of acute alcohol use and symptoms of long-term alcohol use. Source: The Gale Group. Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, 3rd ed.
