AD (Crews & Vetreno, 2016; Mayfield et al., 2013; Pascual, Pla, Miñarro, & Guerri, 2014). Ethanol has been shown to potentiate and prolong the effects of proinflammatory cytokines and microglial activation (Qin et al., 2008). This suggests that immune cells may provide an accessible window into how ethanol affects gene expression. Postmortem brains show the effects of both potentially pre-existing differences between alcoholics and controls and effects of long-term exposure to high levels of alcohol. There are many unrelated variables, however, including cause of death, recency of exposure to ethanol, and post-mortem interval. Lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) can be studied under controlled conditions, and have been used for functional studies that cannot be done with post-mortem brain tissue, such as identifying lithium induced gene expression changes in bipolar patients and controls (Fries et al., 2017). Recent studies have shown strong correlations between blood and brain for cis expression QTLs (eQTLs) and methylation QTLs (Qi et al., 2018).
