A single SNP in ADH7 (rs284786) was nominally associated with a DSM-IIIR-based definition of alcohol dependence (Edenberg et al., 2006), one downstream of ADH7 was suggestively associated with AD in Mexican-Americans (Norden-Krichmar et al., 2014), and several in that region were associated with maxdrinks in Native Americans (Peng et al., 2014b). Analysis of alcohol levels after an oral alcohol challenge with 103 SNPs across the ADH region showed early effects from SNPs in and near the 5’ region of ADH7 through intron 6, with only nominally significant effects of SNPs across the region between ADH7 and ADH1A (Birley et al., 2009). In a meta-analysis of average drinking (g/kg/day) among Europeans the most significant SNP in the ADH region was rs2584448 in ADH7 (p=3.9×10−4); when the analysis restricted the controls to drinkers, the top SNP was rs2165672, also in ADH7 (Schumann et al., 2011), neither was genome-wide significant.
