Shared genetic architecture and neurobiological pathways of problematic alcohol use and anxiety disorders

Problematic alcohol use frequently occurs in conjunction with anxiety disorders. Between 20 to 40 percent of individuals with anxiety disorders are also diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. Anxiety can lead people to use alcohol to self-medicate, and disordered alcohol use can cause increased anxiety for people when they go through withdrawal.

Joshua Gray is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Uniformed Services University, and one of the authors of a new study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. For the study, he and his colleagues drew on data from biobanks that originally included more than a million individuals. The samples were then modified to minimize overlap between the datasets, and the team ended up with about 860,000 individuals in the problematic alcohol use analysis and about 620,000 in the anxiety analysis.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-026-02494-z

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