In contrast to previous studies of risk factors for alcoholism, this prospective study also investigated the risk of AUD in offspring of both female and male patients with AUD. The results in Table 4 suggest that a stronger association may be present between parental alcoholism and alcoholism in female offspring than in male offspring. A large scale twin study did not find a significant gender difference in genetic variance in AUD (Heath et al., 1997), but a stronger effect of maternal AUD on female than male offspring may be explained by assuming that social learning and identification with the mother play a stronger role in the development of female offspring. However, this would not explain why the effect of a father with AUD also appears to be stronger in women than in men. It may indeed be argued that a stronger effect of parental AUD on female offspring is inconsistent with a previous family study (Lieb et al., 2002) as well as previous Danish adoption studies which failed to identify a genetic component in women (Goodwin et al, 1973, Goodwin
