Abstract
Sensation seeking is a personality trait that has been associated with disinhibited behaviours including substance use and gambling, but also with high-risk sport practices including skydiving, paragliding, and downhill skiing. Twin studies have shown that sensation seeking is moderately heritable, and candidate genes encoding components involved in dopaminergic transmission have been investigated as contributing to this type of behaviour. To determine whether variants in the regulatory regions of the dopamine-4-receptor gene (DRD4) influenced sport-specific sensation seeking, we analyzed five polymorphisms (−1106T/C, −906T/C, −809G/A, −291C/T, 120-bp duplication) in the promoter region of the gene in a cohort of skiers and snowboarders (n = 599) that represented a broad range of sensation seeking behaviours. We grouped subjects by genotype at each of the five loci and compared impulsive sensation seeking and domain-specific (skiing) sensation seeking between groups. There were no significant associations between genotype(s) and general or domain-specific sensation seeking in the skiers and snowboarders, suggesting that while DRD4 has previously been implicated in sensation seeking, the promoter variants investigated in this study do not contribute to sensation seeking in this athlete population.
Highlights
Downhill sports such as skiing and snowboarding are popular high-risk pastimes that often involve high speeds, hazardous terrain, and uncertain weather conditions and carry a potential for severe injury [1]
Sex was entered in the initial analysis as a covariate because there were significant differences between the sexes in both domain-specific and general sensation seeking (CSSQ-S: t(576) = 13.70, p,.001; Zuckerman Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire (ZKPQ) Impulsive Sensation Seeking (ImpSS): t(494) = 3.20, p = .001)
There were no significant associations between either the CSSQ-S scores or the ZKPQ ImpSS scores and genotype for any of the DRD4 promoter variants tested
Summary
Downhill sports such as skiing and snowboarding are popular high-risk pastimes that often involve high speeds, hazardous terrain, and uncertain weather conditions and carry a potential for severe injury [1]. While environmental factors likely influence attitudes towards, and behaviour in, high-risk sports, twin studies have shown sensation seeking to be moderately heritable [5], suggesting that genotype may underlie some of the motivation for participation in such activities. Most genetic studies of sensation seeking traits have investigated genes encoding components of the dopaminergic pathway due to the purported role of dopamine in behavioural activation and instrumental learning [6,7]. Variants in the dopamine-4-receptor gene (DRD4, 11p.15.5) and its adjacent regulatory region have been associated with personality traits that share a common motivational tendency towards behavioural approach, including, novelty seeking, extraversion, and sensation seeking [8,9,10,11]. While there are numerous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the promoter region of the gene [12], most have rare minor alleles and are not likely to be informative for studying genetic associations with continuous personality traits [13]; personality genetics studies on the DRD4 are often investigated using the
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