Research teasing apart specific types of stressful COVID-19-related experiences associated with problematic alcohol use (e.g., social disconnection, economic hardships), and detailing how they interact with individualized risk factors (e.g., history of AUD, gender, polygenic and neural risk factors), will allow us to better understand strategies that may buffer against the re-emergence, exacerbation, or new development of AUD that may occur as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold. This study analyzed new data collected during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic from longtime participants in the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) study, in conjunction with their data on AUD and drinking collected in prior assessments. The primary aim of this study was to examine the associations between COVID-19-related stressors and coping activities with changes in drunkenness frequency since the start of the pandemic among men and women with and without a history of AUD. Using information from earlier (pre-pandemic) data collections, we further categorized individuals as having had no prior history of AUD pre-pandemic, having been symptomatic of AUD pre-pandemic, having been in remission from AUD but
