Filippi I, Hoertel N, Artiges E, et al. - In view of the neuroimaging studies of vulnerability to Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) recognizing structural and functional variations which might indicate inheritable features in alcohol-naïve relatives of AUD individuals (FH+) vs controls having no such family history (FH-), researchers analyzed FH+ young adults with no prevalent confounders using whole-brain analysis for their brain structure and reward-related neural activations (fMRI). They performed a 3 T MRI coupled with a whole-brain voxel-based method on 46 FH+ and 45 FH- male and female participants who had no severe childhood maltreatment exposure, neither any psychiatric disorder or AUD, nor a prenatal exposure to maternal AUD. Outcomes revealed smaller grey matter volumes in the frontal and cingulate regions as well as in the bilateral nucleus accumbens and right insula among FH+ participants vs FH- controls. FH+ participants’ fMRI datasets displayed a blunted activation in the middle cingulum relative to FH- controls’ during the processing of reward magnitude, and greater activation in the anterior cingulum in response to anticipation of a small win. These findings support the link of family history of alcohol use disorder with structural and functional variations including brain regions involved in reward processes.