Research Paper on:
The Causes and Effects of Alcoholism

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
are no closer to understanding alcoholism in the twenty-first century than they were back in 1819, when a German-Russian physician, Dr. C. von Bruhl-Cramer published one of the first and  one of the most significant texts on the subject. It was Dr. von Bruhl-Cramer who initially described the condition as Trunksucht (which is translated to mean dipsomania and later  evolved into the term alcoholism (Kielhorn, 1996). What has been discovered is that there is no singular factor from which alcoholism originates; it is, rather, the result of cause  and effect. In terms of cause, the investigation is actually two-fold, as it is both internal and external. According to the American Medical Association (AMA), one needs to look  no farther than inside a humans biochemistry to reveal the roots of alcoholism. The AMA maintains that alcoholism is a "metabolic disturbance" or chemical imbalance, which could be abnormal  blood sugar; "endocrine deficiencies," such as "hypothyroidism, hypopituitarism, hypoadrenalism, and hypogonadism;" or "glandular dysfunction" (Martindale, 1977, p. 225). There is also evidence of genetics, which determines a persons body  makeup. Through an analytical procedure known as Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP), scientists can actually predict linkages related to the susceptibility to certain diseases (Wastyn and Wastyn, 1997).  According to a study performed by Kenneth Blum and his colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center and the University of California (Los Angeles campus) discovered that there  was a definite association "between the presence of the A1 allele[1] of the D[sub 2] dopamine receptor (DRD2) gene and the presence of alcoholism and the absence of the DRD2  A1 allele and the absence of alcoholism in the brain tissue of 70 subjects equally divided between the two groups" (Wastyn and Wastyn, 1997, p. 13). Although there has