Alcoholism in the family affects your brain
You don’t have to be a drinker for your brain to be affected by alcoholism. A new study shows that just having a parent with an alcohol use disorder affects how your brain transitions between active and resting states — regardless of your own drinking habits. The brain reconfigures itself between completing a mentally demanding task and resting. But for the brain of someone with a family history of an alcohol use disorder, this reconfiguration doesn’t happen. While the missing transition doesn’t seem to affect how well a person performs the mentally demanding task itself, it might be related to larger scale brain functions that give rise to behaviors associated with addiction. In particular, study subjects without this brain process demonstrated greater impatience in waiting for rewards, a behavior associated with addiction.
— source Purdue University | Feb 10, 2020