Alcohol misuse affects millions of people worldwide due to its widespread availability and strong addictive potential. The strongest effects on alcohol misuse stem from personality traits. The most salient traits related to alcohol misuse are impulsivity and sensation seeking, i.e., tendency to make decisions without forethought and to seek out novel and exciting experiences.
However, the personality factors alone are insufficient for explaining the development of alcohol misuse. Individual development unravels embedded within multiple environmental contexts from which each influences the risk of alcohol misuse in a unique way. The totality of environmental exposures from conception to death has been conceptualized as the exposome in epidemiology. The exposome comprises internal exposome (e.g., metabolomics, hormones, or inflammation), specific external exposome (e.g., diet, physical activity), or a broader external (macrolevel) exposome (e.g., urban characteristics).
Researchers have recently emphasized the need to study macrolevel environmental effects on substance use, or the ‘exposome of addiction.’ The most important macrolevel characteristics associated with individual alcohol misuse were found to be: a) a neighborhood disadvantage, b) availability, and c) physical properties of the environment.
Existing exposome studies have rarely focused on mental health outcomes, and there has been no exposome study focusing on alcohol misuse. The proposed project will address these limitations by comprehensively assessing the joint and interactive effects of external exposome and personality characteristics on alcohol misuse in a longitudinal design spanning from pregnancy to mid-adulthood, comparing birth cohorts from two countries.