Since research has shown that sexual assault is most commonly associated with PTSD in women (Kessler et al., 1995), it is possible that other risk factors for PTSD development, such as a FH of alcohol dependence, may increase the risk for developing PTSD to a greater extent or exacerbate the effects of exposure to sexual assaultive trauma in women, which could explain our observed result that increasing FHD of alcohol dependence increased the association with PTSD in female participants with sexual assaultive trauma. Prior studies have shown that children who grow up in a household with at least one parent with alcohol dependence are more likely to experience trauma compared to children with unaffected parents (Dube et al., 2001; Meyers et al., 2014). However, these studies have only examined dichotomous parental alcohol dependence status, whereas FHD measures may be more useful (Cservenka et al., 2015; Pandey et al., 2020; Powers et al., 2017). Future studies should investigate how different levels of FHD may influence PTSD symptoms and risk, as well as examine molecular genetic risk of alcohol dependence on PTSD in female individuals who have been exposed to a sexual assaultive trauma.
