Genomics and epigenomics of substance use disorders: An introduction

Abstract

Substance use disorders (SUD) are common conditions around theworld, with important health and societal impacts, particularly inthe burden of disease (disability-adjusted life years) (Whiteford, Fer-rari, Degenhardt, Feigin, & Vos, 2015). The Global Burden of DiseaseStudy estimated the global number of cases for SUD for several sub-stances as follows: 94.8 million for alcohol, 17.2 million for amphet-amine, 15.5 million for opioids, and 13.1 million for cannabis(Whiteford, 2015). In the United States, the lifetime and 12-monthprevalences of SUD were 9.9% and 3.9%, respectively (Grantet al., 2016). In addition, polysubstance use is an important challengein the field of addiction research (Whiteford et al., 2015).