It was documented that the risk to develop heroin addiction is similar among all ethnic groups. The possibility that the specific gene variants contributing to the vulnerability to develop heroin addiction differ among ethnic groups, is intriguing. This phenomenon was found for Crohn's disease (where the susceptibility CARD15 variants in EA were not present in Japanese), AIDS (where the protective CCR5 variant is common in EA and absent in other ethnic groups), and Alzheimer's disease (where the APOE E4 variant have differential effect between ethnic groups) (Tate & Goldstein, 2004). It points to a public health challenge to provide population-specific, and in the future individual-specific, diagnosis and treatment.
