Newswise — People with blue eyes might have a greater chance of becoming alcoholics, according to a unique new study by genetic researchers at the University of Vermont. 
 
 The work, led by Arvis Sulovari, a doctoral student in cellular, molecular and biological sciences, and Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Dawei Li, Ph.D., is the first to make a direct connection between a person’s eye color and alcohol dependence. The results of the research, published in the July issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics: Neuropsychiatric Genetics (Part B), suggest the hope of finding the roots of not only alcoholism, but also many other psychiatric illnesses. 
 
 “This suggests an intriguing possibility – that eye color can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis,” Sulovari says. 
 
 The authors found that primarily European Americans with light-colored eyes – including green, grey and brown in the center – had a higher incidence of alcohol dependency than those with dark brown eyes, with the strongest tendency among blue-eyed individuals. The study outlines the genetic components that determine eye color and shows that they line up along the same chromosome as the genes related to excessive alcohol use. 
 
 But, Li says, “we still don’t know the reason” and more research is needed. 
 
 Li came to the University of Vermont in 2012 and has studied psychiatric genetics for a decade. During that time, he has worked with physicians and scientists throughout the Northeast who have collaborated to build a clinical and genetic database of more than 10,000 individuals, mostly African Americans and European Americans, diagnosed with at least one psychiatric illness. Many have multiple diagnoses of diseases, including depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as addiction and alcohol or drug dependence. 
 
 “These are complex disorders,” he says. “There are many genes, and there are many environmental triggers.” 
 
 From that extensive database, Li’s and Sulovari’s study filtered out the alcohol-dependent patients with European ancestry, a total of 1,263 samples. After Sulovari noticed the eye-color connection, they retested their analysis three times, arranging and rearranging the groups to compare age, gender and different ethnic or geographic backgrounds, such as southern and northern parts of the continent. 
 
 Next, Li wants to delve deeper into the relationship between cultural background and genetic makeup, continuing his quest to find the mechanisms of mental illness. His greatest challenge: All the genes identified in the past 20 years “can only explain a small percentage of the genetics part that has been suggested,” he says. “A large number is still missing, is still unknown.” 
 
 Li just submitted a grant application to pursue those missing genes and is working on another proposal for funding to continue that pursuit using the large database of patient samples. His work with Sulovari has provided a strong stepping-stone, he says. 
 
 “What has fascinated me the most about this work has been investigating the interface between statistics, informatics and biology,” says Sulovari. “It’s an incredible opportunity to study genomics in the context of complex human diseases.” 
 
 SEE ORIGINAL STUDY ||||| The seed for this crawl was a list of every host in the Wayback Machine 
 
 This crawl was run at a level 1 (URLs including their embeds, plus the URLs of all outbound links including their embeds) 
 
 The WARC files associated with this crawl are not currently available to the general public. ||||| Eyes can tell a lot about a person: what they’re thinking and feeling, of course, and whether they’re lying or loyal. This is perhaps why the adage “the eyes are the window to the soul” rings true. But though your eye color may seem rather superficial, it can say a lot about your health too, in ways you may not have been aware. 
 
 This is because a variety of genes go into deciding your eye color. There aren’t just two genes — one for blue eyes and one for darker eyes as many scientists previously thought — but rather, there are up to 12 to 13 gene variations that can decide color. These genes linked to eye color are often at play in your body in different ways, which is why eye color can be a determinant of other health aspects. “These genes do other things in the body,” Dr. Jari Louhelainen, a senior lecturer in biomolecular sciences at Liverpool John Moores University, told the Daily Mail. “One of them, NCX-4, which is linked to darker eyes, controls many proteins, of which one has recently been linked to pain.” 
 
 Our skin, hair, and eyes all get their color from a group of natural pigments called melanins. The amount of melanin in your iris defines whether you’re born with green, blue, or brown eyes. People who are born with a lot of melanin in the stroma of the iris tend to have brown eyes, while people with less melanin have green or hazel eyes, and finally, having no melanin typically leads to blue eyes. Eye color is unique for every individual (no one has the same exact color as anyone else) and it changes constantly, shifting shades over the period of a lifetime depending on your genes, diseases, and age. Below are some of the things your eye color can tell about you. 
 
 Your Ancestry 
 
 In 2008, scientists discovered that everyone who has blue eyes is genetically linked to the same common ancestor, a person who experienced a genetic mutation sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before this mutation, every human had brown eyes. “A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a ‘switch,’ which literally ‘turned off’ the ability to produce brown eyes,” said Hans Eiberg, a lead researcher of the study at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen, in a press release. In short, this “switch” limited the OCA2 gene from producing melanin, which led to blue color in eyes. So, if you’re blue-eyed, it’s likely that you may share a common ancestor with all the other blue-eyed people out there. 
 
 How We Handle Pain 
 
 Some scientists may argue that your eye color can tell you something about how your pain tolerance. One study published earlier this year found that out of 58 women, those with light-colored eyes seemed to experience less pain when giving birth compared to those with dark-colored eyes. Not only did women with light-colored eyes experience less physical pain, but they also reportedly had less anxiety, depression, and negative thoughts. “Human pain is correlated with multiple factors like gender, age, and hair color,” said Dr. Inna Belfar, a geneticist at the University of Pittsburgh who was a leading author of the study, at the American Pain Society's annual meeting in June. “Researchers have found that red hair is associated with resistance to anestheticsm and also to increased anxiety, and darker eye color has been reportedly found to correlate with increased physiologic reactivity and drug-induced pupil dilation." 
 
 Other studies have hinted that your eye color may indicate something about how well you can handle booze, too. In the past, researchers have found that people with light-colored eyes were more likely to abuse alcohol than people with dark-colored eyes because they could handle larger amounts of alcohol. 
 
 A Window To Your Soul — And Personality 
 
 A study conducted in Australia found that people with lighter eyes could be less “agreeable,” and far more competitive, than people with darker eyes. Agreeableness is a personality factor that is typically associated with empathy, friendliness, generosity, and compassion. After examining 336 participants, researchers from two different universities in Australia found that people with darker eyes were more “agreeable” than North Europeans with blue eyes, though the same association didn’t hold true for Europeans in general. This may sound like a stretch, and more research will be needed to solidify the claim, but researchers believe it may have something to do with our evolutionary roots — thousands of years ago, our Northern European ancestors found light-colored eyes more attractive and ideal for mating. Thus, it's possible that blue-eyed people ended up having more of a competitive edge, at least in Northern Europe. 
 
 Trust 
 
 Could it be possible that people with brown eyes are more trustworthy than people with blue eyes? In a recent study, researchers had participants rate facial photographs of 40 female and 40 male students on how trustworthy they appeared. Brown-eyed people were significantly more likely to be perceived as trustworthy than people with blue eyes. But the level of someone's perceived trustworthiness could also be influenced by facial shape; the researchers found that "although the brown-eyed faces were perceived as more trustworthy than the blue-eyed ones, it was not brown eye color per se that caused the stronger perception of trustworthiness but rather the facial features associated with brown eyes," they wrote in the abstract. 
 
 Disease, Aging, And Trauma 
 
 In addition, some studies have linked specific eye colors to diseases like diabetes, melanoma, and vitiligo. A 2012 study out of the University of Colorado School of Medicine found that people with blue eyes are less likely to have vitiligo, a skin condition that results in the loss of brown pigment from certain areas of the skin and leaves white blotches across some parts of the body. The study examined 3,000 Americans of non-Hispanic European ancestry who had vitiligo, and found that 43 percent had tan or brown eyes, while 27 percent had blue or grey eyes. This was quite different from the distribution of eye color among Americans of European descent, where 52 percent have blue or grey eyes, and only 27 percent have brown or tan eyes. 
 
 People's eyes may change hues depending on how bloodshot they are or what shirt they're wearing, but having each eye be a different color — a condition called heterochromia — can also be indicative of certain diseases, such as Horner's syndrome, Fuch's heterochromic iridocyclitis, or pigmentary glaucoma. In addition, people with late-stage diabetes might notice their eyes darkening. 
 
 Having lighter eyes may also mean that you're more sensitive to the sun's UV rays, since they contain less pigment to protect them. As a result, those with blue, grey, or green eyes may have an increased risk for melanoma of the uvea, which is the middle layer of the eye. "People with light iris color need to be more diligent in wearing UV-protected sunglasses," Dr. Ruth Williams, president-elect of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, told Everyday Health. 
 
 So, not only are your eyes your own personal window to the visuals and colors of the world, but they're a way for your body to tell a story of your own. As Karel Kleisner, an eye researcher from Charles University in Prague, says: "Eyes are not only for seeing, but also to be seen,"
– Is it mere coincidence, or do people with blue eyes really run a higher risk of being alcoholics? A new study out of the University of Vermont suggests that the link not only exists, but it appears to be a genetic one. Reporting in the American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics, the researchers find that among European-Americans, those with light-colored eyes—such as green or gray in the center—have higher rates of alcohol dependency than Euro-Americans with dark brown eyes; that link is strongest in blue-eyed people. "We still don't know the reason," researcher Dawei Li says in a University of Vermont press release, but they do know that the very genes that determine eye color are situated along the same chromosome as genes that are known to be linked to alcohol dependency. It's not the first time the eye color-alcohol link has been found: A 2000 study arrived at a similar conclusion, noting that among one sample set of women, dark-eyed females averaged 4.91 drinks in the last month to light-eyed females' 5.78. Blue eyes also correlate with other attributes, including lower pain tolerance and higher competitiveness, reports Medical Daily. "This suggests an intriguing possibility—that eye color can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis," says lead researcher Arvis Sulovari. The researchers say these findings could help us better understand the roots of not only alcoholism but other psychiatric illnesses as well. (Check out how many Americans are considered to have a drinking problem.)