In population-based samples, measures of social context like marriage can mark significant life transitions that accompany natural reductions in drinking (Dawson et al., 2006), consistent with evidence that more than 50% of individuals who remit from AUD do so without formal treatment (Cunningham et al., 2000; Sobell et al., 1996). In clinical samples, similar measures are associated with treatment outcome and can also mark changes associated with recovery (reviewed in Adamson et al., 2009). Whether this relationship between social context and remission holds in samples with high familial risk for AUD is unknown. The increased genetic and environmental risks for AUD which accompany high-risk samples (e.g., Jacob et al., 2003) might decrease the relative salience of social context for remission. Increased familial risk for AUD, however, seems not to contribute to decreased likelihood of remission. In 40 years of longitudinal birth cohort data from sons of fathers with AUDs, for example, only 18 of 361 carefully selected, biologically-based, premorbid predictors of alcohol dependence were associated with failure to remit, suggesting remission is subject to social influences even in high-risk samples
