for each additional year of heavy drinking) (Ruiz et al., 2013), which is consistent with findings that women with AUD have greater alterations in white matter compared to men with AUD (Srivastava et al., 2010). Alcohol expectancy may be related to alterations in gray matter in problem drinking women; positive alcohol expectancy was associated with less gray matter volume in the right posterior insula, a region involved in drug craving, in non-dependent social-drinking women compared to men (Ide et al., 2017). Thus, psychological factors associated with gray matter volume loss may represent a neural phenotype of risk for AUD in the transition from social to more habitual drinking habits (Ide et al., 2017). It should be noted that one study found that women with AUD had 4.4% larger reward system volumes compared to same-sex controls, whereas men with AUD had 4.1% smaller reward region volumes compared to same-sex controls (Sawyer et al., 2017), indicating further discrepancies in neuroanatomical mechanisms associated with AUD.
