Jeffrey F Scherrer

..Smoking is a well-established correlate of suicidal behavior. It is not known if familial risk factors contribute to this association...

..Smoking interventions may have greatest impact by targeting smoking prevention among peer groups in adolescent and young adult populations...

..Depression is a known risk factor for mortality after an acute myocardial infarction. Patients with treatment-responsive depression may have a better prognosis than those with treatment-resistant depression...

..45). Overall there is little evidence that common genetic and environmental factors account for the co-occurrence of depression and diabetes in middle aged men. Further research in female twins and larger cohorts is warranted...

..The present study uses a national Veterans Affairs cohort to test whether antidepressants increase or decrease risk of MI and all-cause mortality...

..This risk may be due to a greater susceptibility for myocardial infarction (MI) in depressed patients with type 2 diabetes compared with nondepressed patients with type 2 diabetes...

..Depression is a risk factor for incident myocardial infarction (MI), but little is known about the independent or additive risk from anxiety disorders...

..This study evaluates whether depression is a risk factor for incident myocardial infarction (MI) in Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) between 30 and 79 years of age...

..This study extends existing research by inclusion of adolescents and young adults in an offspring of twins design which makes it possible to take into account genetic and environmental risks for substance use disorder...

..These associations are partially accounted for by psychiatric covariates and genetic and family environmental factors...

..We tested whether alcohol, nicotine, and illicit drug use and dependence were associated with lifetime educational attainment after controlling for familial background characteristics...

..08). Perceived sibling, friend and school peer substance use are strongly associated with CAD in young adults even after accounting for latent familial risk and for multiple measured intra-family and extra-family environmental influences...

..Findings characterize a rarely examined aspect of the course of ND development and highlight critical distinctions in risk profiles across stages of tobacco involvement...

..Public health messages and therapeutic interventions that reinforce the randomness of gambling and draw attention to distorted thinking may prevent the development of problem gambling and improve treatment outcomes...

..To determine if depression contributes to incident heart disease after accounting for genetic, behavioral, and medical factors associated with both conditions...

..Empirically derived subtypes of nicotine dependence are mostly characterized by increasing severity. Suggestions for refinement of nicotine dependence diagnostic criteria are discussed...

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..These findings suggest comorbid PTSD may represent a genetically mediated vulnerability to psychopathology after trauma...

..Evidence is also provided for the utility of the LGH in assessing lifetime pathological gambling symptoms...

..exclusively negative (physiological) responses suggests the importance of considering both dimensions in combination to characterize risk for smoking-related outcomes...

..To compute the common and specific genetic and environmental contributions to nicotine dependence (ND) alcohol dependence (AD) and cannabis dependence (CD)...

..We investigated whether use and early-onset use of cigarettes, alcohol and cannabis contributed an increase in risk for initiation of subsequent psychoactive substances in women (N = 3729, mean age = 21.7)...

..Early alcohol use is associated with abuse and dependence of licit and illicit substances later in life. The role of genetic and environmental factors in this association is not conclusive...

..Although pathological gambling (PG) and major depression (MD) frequently co-occur, little is known regarding the relative contributions of environmental and genetic factors to the codevelopment of the disorders...

..In this study, we characterize patterns of cannabis and tobacco use (tobacco but not cannabis, cannabis but not tobacco or both) and compare the factors associated with onset of tobacco before cannabis and cannabis before tobacco...

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..However, relatively little is known about how to characterize the severity of withdrawal, including whether withdrawal subtypes exist in male smokers. If so, do these subtypes represent quantitative or qualitative differences?..

..In contrast to previous research, there is limited evidence for increased risk associated with early-onset use in this sample of Vietnam-era veterans...

..Although these consequences and correlates have been reported, little is known about the health-related functional impairment associated with gambling...

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..Co-twin analyses accounted for familial contributions to past-year gambling problems...

..7; 95% CI: 5.6-62.6) classes. We found evidence for both qualitative and quantitative subjective effect profiles. Subjective effects, both positive and adverse are associated with lifetime risk for marijuana and cocaine dependence...

..We use the result of these analyses to show how the use of a particular drug disorder phenotype for selecting cases could impact final sample composition...

..Despite the substantial genetic overlap between the two disorders, there is evidence for genetic effects specific for AD and ND...

..This may reflect the changed social-cultural environment between 1992 and 2002, characterized by increasing access to legalized gambling...

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..The risk of experiencing nicotine withdrawal after a quit attempt was related partly to genetic vulnerability; lifetime risk for both failed cessation and nicotine withdrawal was related partly to genetic factors that were correlated...

..In the current study we constructed a model of offspring nonparticipation in a twin-family design and computed weights to recapture the distribution of offspring alcohol abuse and dependence...

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..Current evidence is not conclusive regarding gender differences for cannabis use, abuse and dependence. It is not known if symptom profiles differ by gender...

..The present study examines the clustering of offspring lifetime substance use and psychiatric disorders into subtypes and characterizes them in terms of familial and non-familial influences using an offspring-of-twins design...

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..The children-of-twins (COT) design can be used to elucidate the association of a parental trait and an offspring outcome such as the association of parental alcoholism and offspring suicidality...

..To assess the effects of former heavy marijuana use on selected aspects of health...

..We examined the impact of mental health diagnoses on progression to AIDS-defining illness (ADI) and death in a large cohort of HIV-infected veterans who accessed care between 2001 and 2006...

..The current results indicate that a duration of ethanol consumption as short as eight weeks produces deficits in learning and memory that are present 12 weeks after withdrawal...

..Patients consent to witnessed testing but most tests are unwitnessed. The purpose of the present study was to compare treatment effectiveness estimates derived from witnessed versus unwitnessed urine samples...