Alcoholics usually blame their issues on everything from genetics to the deliciousness of rum and now they’ve got one more scapegoat for their dependency — their eye color.
Geneticists at the University of Vermont have found links between eye color and alcohol dependency. The white coats found alcoholism more frequently in people with blue eyes and less frequently among those with dark brown eyes. Researchers also found the eye color most often found in the family of alcoholics are black eyes.
The study, which offers another piece of evidence that alcohol dependency has a genetic component, involved a sample of 1,263 individual genetic profiles. They were pulled from a database that only contains genetic profiles of people diagnosed with at least one psychiatric illness, which includes an addiction to, or dependence on, drugs or alcohol. For this study, the geneticists filtered the database for patients with alcohol addiction or dependence and European ancestry.
Previous research has shown that eye color can be associated with all many different health conditions so this isn’t exactly groundbreaking research but it’s good know it’s not entirely my fault I’m a miserable drunk. Now I can blame it on my dad, since I inherited his blue eyes. I used to just blame it on my mom, because she’d cause anyone to drink heavily.
[via MSN]