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A study led by VA Connecticut Healthcare Center/Yale researchers reveals ancestries around the world possess a shared genetic architecture for problematic alcohol use – habitual heavy drinking, accompanied by harmful consequences. Hang Zhou, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and of biomedical informatics & data science at Yale School of Medicine and VA Connecticut, and Joel Gelernter, MD, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, and professor of genetics and of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine and VA Connecticut, were first and senior authors, respectively.

A new Yale study published in Neurobiology of Stress shows more trauma and assaults on young Black compared to white Americans is linked to faster cellular aging. Study authors are Terrell Holloway, MD; Zachary Harvanek, MD, PhD; Ke Xu, MD; Derrick Gordon, PhD; and Rajita Sinha, PhD.

Does alcohol drinking make you age faster? The answer is not so straightforward, based on a recently published study by researchers at Yale School of Medicine.

Several Yale researchers, including first author Janitza Montalvo-Ortiz, PhD, and senior author Robert Pietrzak, PhD, MPH, conducted the largest epi-genomewide association study of post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans. Their findings were published in Translational Psychiatry.

Yale study findings that stress does indeed make life’s clock tick faster — but that individuals can help manage the effects by strengthening their emotion regulation and self-control.

Zachary M. Harvanek, MD, PhD; Nia Fogelman, PhD; Ke Xu, MD; and Rajita Sinha, PhD, are co-authors of a paper published in Translational Psychiatry on cumulative stress and its effects on accelerated epigenetic aging in middle-aged community individuals who do not have a medical illness.

Ke Xu, MD, associate professor of psychiatry, wrote this essay in the context of increased attacks against Asians and Asian Americans after officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government derisively associated the SARS-coV-2 virus with China.

Scientists have long understood that genes play an important role in a person’s smoking behavior, and a new genome-wide association study by Yale and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) researchers is helping to explain why some people start to smoke, while others are able to quit.

April Shu, PhD, Postdoctoral Associate in the Xu Lab at Yale School of Medicine, has been selected as a 2020 College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) Travel Award for Early Career Investigators awardee at this year’s virtual meeting of the college.