The study "Parental Alcohol Use Disorder and Offspring Marital Outcomes," appeared in the journal Addiction. It is based on data from legal, medical and pharmacy registries with detailed information on 1.17 million people in Sweden who were born between 1965 and 1975.

Children of parents who have alcohol use disorder are more likely to get married under the age of 25, less likely to get married later in life, and more likely to marry a person who has alcohol use disorder themselves, according to a new study by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden.

"There are many pathways through which a parent's alcohol problems can influence our own risk for alcohol problems. One important pathway, of course, has to do with the genes that parents pass to their children," said the study's lead author, Jessica E. Salvatore, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology in the College of Humanities and Sciences at VCU. "But another important pathway, which we demonstrate here, is through the social environment."

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