Blue eyes have been linked to higher rates of alcohol dependence
Research into the dangers of alcohol from the University of Vermont found what looked like a link between people who have blue eyes and a greater risk of alcoholism.
The study, led by Dr Arvis Sulovari and assistant professor Dawei Li in 2015, was the first to draw a direct connection between a person's eye colour and their risk of alcohol dependency.
For years, professor Li worked on generating a database of over 10,000 people who have been diagnosed with at least one psychiatric illness.
These included conditions like addiction and alcohol dependence, with the expert in microbiology and molecular genetics saying they were 'complex disorders' and that 'many genes' and 'many environmental triggers' were involved.
Advert
The researchers took that database of thousands and identified those with an alcohol dependency, and from studying the results, a fascinating discovery was made.
Their database then filtered out patients with European ancestry to a total of 1,263 samples.
Dr Sulovari spotted what looked like a connection between a person's eye colour and their alcohol dependency, with the researchers checking their work three times just to be sure.
"This suggests an intriguing possibility - that eye colour can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis," Dr Sulovari said.
They found that people with lighter coloured eyes appeared to have greater rates of alcohol dependency compared to people with darker coloured eyes.
Greens, greys and most of all hues of blue were found to have the strongest tendencies towards higher rates of alcoholism, while people with dark brown eyes were less likely to do so.
Further study also found that the genetic components behind someone's eye colour lined up with the same chromosome as the genes which were linked to excessive alcohol consumption.
However, before you start using eye colour to guesstimate how likely you are to become an alcoholic, the study is the first of its kind and the researchers have said they 'still don't know the reason' why this is.
It's going to take a lot more testing and study into the potential link between eye colour and having higher rates of alcohol dependency.
The researchers have planned to do further tests into the links between a person's cultural background and their genetic makeup to more clearly fill out the picture of why people are the way they are.
According to professor Li, so much knowledge about our genetics is 'still unknown' and what we've learned about genes over the past 20 years 'can only explain a small percentage' of what we see.
Joe Harker