Beginning in 1988, 99% of the probands from the SDPS were followed up at about age 30, when the low LR was found to relate to later heavy drinking, alcohol problems, and AUDs, but not to dependence on other substances or to major psychiatric disorders (Schuckit and Smith, 1996; Schuckit et al., 2014). Subsequent every five-year follow-ups of > 90% of original subjects documented that the relationships of low LR to future alcohol problems were partially mediated by heavy drinking friends, overly optimistic expectations of the effects of alcohol, and using alcohol to cope with stress, characteristics that became the focus of a successful program to decrease the heavy drinking risk for 500 18-year-old university students (Gonçalves et al., 2017; Savage et al., 2015; Schuckit et al., 2016a).
