advantage of using objective measures that may be closer to the mechanisms underlying LR than subjective measures, there have been relatively few other human studies that have used hormone responses to index LR. In one study, Asians with ALDH2*2 alleles, who are at very low risk for the development of alcoholism, were found to have significantly higher cortisol levels after alcohol challenge than Asians who did not have that allele (Wall et al. 1994). Additionally, a group of Native Americans at high risk for the development of alcoholism had a severely dimished cortisol response following an alcohol challenge (Garcia-Andrade et al. 1997). There have been some data also suggesting that alcohol may dampen cortisol, ACTH, vasopressin and prolactin responses to stress to a larger extent in sons of alcoholics compared to controls (Croissant, Olbrich 2004;Zimmermann et al. 2004;Zimmermann et al. 2009), although this has not been found in all studies (Dai et al. 2007).
