Environmental risk factors including unsafe alcohol consumption and other drug use are risk factors for a variety of poor physical and mental health outcomes such as psychosis, alcoholic liver disease and Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. The purpose of the proposal is to investigate how these factors combined with measures of genetic risk affect these important health outcomes in the UK Biobank data. The purpose is to understand how the effects of environmental factors such as alcohol consumption impact a variety of physical and mental health outcomes. Improved understanding of these outcomes will provide important new data for potential use in public health interventions. The research will use environmental measures such as alcohol consumption combined with genetic, social and health outcome data to study the interaction of these risk factors in determining their impact on physical and mental health. One of our aims is to examine whether certain risk factors have a disproportionate effect on health outcome measures in different groups of individuals. The full cohort will be required because we will wish to study the impact of alcohol use and other environmental risk factors on disease outcome in both a categorical and quantitative manner.
