Of note, since the literature suggests that the associations between childhood maltreatment and adult psychiatric and substance-related outcomes may vary by gender (Widom et al. 1995, 2007, 2008; Wilson & Widom, 2009), we stratified the maltreatment–alcohol dependence associations by gender in a sensitivity analysis (results provided in online Supplementary Table S1). The direction and significance of the sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse and physical neglect associations did not vary by gender. However, for emotional neglect, there was a positive significant association among women (OR 1.26, 95% CI 1.03– 1.55). This suggests that the role of childhood emotional neglect in the risk of adult alcohol dependence may vary by gender, which should be explored further in future work.
