AIMS:

Health-risk behaviours - here including alcohol, tobacco, drug use, risk taking and antisocial behaviour - are prevalent in early adulthood and highly comorbid. They constitute a major public health challenge impacting individuals, families and society. Identifying environmental risk factors causally associated with health-risk behaviours is crucial to design effective interventions.

The main objective of the proposed research project is to identify environmental risk factors causally associated with health-risk behaviours in emerging adulthood. To achieve this aim, the project will build on advances in genetics, using DNA information to strengthen causal inference.

The project will largely build on already collected data and, pending on funding may include additional data collection regarding health risk behaviours and environmental risk in early adulthood.

The project will investigate three major questions:

1. Comorbidity between health-risk behaviours: We will test whether the observed comorbidity within health-risk behaviours is due to underlying causal relationships or arises from genetic and environmental confounding (for instance alcohol use and antisocial behaviour).

2. Magnitude and consequences of gene-environment correlations: We will examine gene-environment correlations by looking at genetic influences on environmental risk factors (e.g. neighbourhood safety). We will then test to what extent the relationship between risk factors and health-risk behaviours may arise from shared genetic influences.

3. Early and concurrent environmental predictors: We will build on the longitudinal feature of the datasets to examine how early and concurrent risk-factors predict health-risk behaviours. We will contrast conventional analyses and classical techniques to examine causality with analyses using DNA information to strengthen causal inference.