People with blue eyes are biggest boozers - study

People with light coloured eyes are more likely to indulge in too many drinks. Photo / Thinkstock

People with blue eyes are more likely to be alcoholics, according to a new study.

Researchers found those with light-coloured eyes - blue, green and grey and light brown in the centre - were more likely to hit the bottle than those with brown eyes, or darker.

People with blue eyes were also more likely to be addicted to alcohol, said the team from the University of Vermont. They are the first to make a connection between eye colour and alcohol dependence.

The parts of genes that determine eye colour line up along the same chromosome as the genes related to excessive alcohol use.

"This suggests an intriguing possibility - that eye color can be useful in the clinic for alcohol dependence diagnosis," said researcher Arvis Sulovari.

However, they don't know do not know why this is and said more research is needed.

Data was used from a 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.

They filtered out the alcohol-dependent patients with European ancestry, and found a total of 1,263.

After noticing the connection between eye colour and alcoholism, they retested their analysis three times.

They arranged and rearranged the groups to compare age, gender and different ethnic or geographic backgrounds, such as southern and northern parts of the continent.

But the connection between a lighter eye colour and an addiction to alcohol was still strong.

The paper was published in the July issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics: Neuropsychiatric Genetics.

- nzherald.co.nz, Daily Mail