People With Blue Eyes Have a Greater Risk of Becoming Alcoholics

People with blue eyes and other light-colored hues such as green, gray, or hazel may have a higher risk for alcohol dependency than those with darker eyes, according to a study.

Researchers from the University of Vermont found that the color of a person's eyes may be associated to alcohol dependency and that alcoholism may be genetic. The findings have been published in Neuropsychiatric Genetics.

The scientists believe that further investigation of their findings could open up ways to better understand other psychiatric conditions, on top of developing better alcoholism prevention and treatment methods.

"This suggests an intriguing possibility -- that eye color can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis," Arvis Sulovari, co-author of the study, PhD student in cellular, molecular, and biological sciences, told Science Daily.

For the study, the researchers studied a genetic database containing information from over 10,000 African American and European Americans who have been diagnosed with at least one psychiatric illness such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, addiction, and alcohol and drug dependency.

"These are complex disorders," says Dawei Li, co-researcher of the study. "There are many genes, and there are many environmental triggers."

In the extensive database, scientists gathered 1,263 samples from those with European ancestry and found that alcohol dependence was more prevalent among people with blue eyes. Upon observing the pattern of eye color and dependency, the researchers retested their analysis thrice more by rearranging the groups by age, gender, ethnicity, and geographic backgrounds.

The researchers were also able to find a connection between genes for eye color and genes linked to alcohol dependence. The researchers characterized "alcohol dependence" using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - 4th Edition, according to Li, via The Huffington Post.

According to Medical Daily, the researchers cannot discern the connection between alcohol dependence and blue eyes but will be continuing their research.

Li, Sulovari, and their colleagues will attempt to recreate the study results and if any correlation shows, will try to discover if the connection is caused by genetics or if it is partly caused by cultural factors.

"What has fascinated me the most about this work has been investigating the interface between statistics, informatics and biology," Sulovari concluded. "It's an incredible opportunity to study genomics in the context of complex human diseases."

The most notable celebrities with blue eyes include actresses Jennifer Aniston, Amanda Seyfried, Alexandra Daddario, Megan Fox, Miranda Kerr and actors Ian Somerhalder, Jared Leto, Ryan Gosling, and Leonardo DiCaprio.