Study shows those with blue eyes have higher risk of alcoholism
They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but apparently they are so much more...
When one looks into someone else's eyes or even your own, you might be thinking to yourself how beautiful the eyes are, how unique, how blue or green or brown.
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You don't tend to think of the possible psychological implications eye colour has.
At the University of Vermont, Dr Arvis Sulovari and assistant professor Dawei Li led a study in 2015 to determine whether or not one's eye colour correlated with a dependency on alcohol.
Now before you start to stress, it is important to note that this is research in its very early stages and even if you have blue eyes, it doesn't mean that you will become an alcoholic.
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Over many years, Professor Li generated a database that consisted of over 10,000 people. Each of these individuals had been diagnosed with at least one psychiatric illness.
The list of psychiatric illnesses included alcohol dependency (AD) and addiction. The researchers then only focused on those with alcohol dependency and that's when they made a fascinating discovery.
In archival samples of European-ancestry subjects, light-eyed individuals have been found to consume more alcohol than dark-eyed individuals. No published population-based studies have directly tested the association between alcohol dependence (AD) and eye color. We hypothesized that light-eyed individuals have a higher prevalence of AD than dark-eyed individuals. A
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Dr Sulovari first spotted the connection between eye colour and AD, with the team checking their findings three times to make sure they were correct.
What they found is that greens, greys, and most of all hues of blue (so lighter eye colours) have stronger tendencies to higher rates of alcoholism than brown-eyed people.
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They also found that the same chromosome in genes linked to excessive alcohol consumption also played a role in determining eye colour.
Although replication is needed, our findings suggest that eye pigmentation information may be useful in research on AD. Further characterization of this association may unravel new AD etiological factors
In basic terms, they concluded that more research and testing is needed, as a lot about genetics is still unknown.
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Main image courtesy of iStock/Radu Bighian