There have been multiple prior GWAS that have utilized symptom counts and factor scores of alcohol dependence criteria (Vrieze et al., 2013a; Yang et al., 2012) but only one attempted to combine indices of alcohol (consumption and dependence), nicotine and drug misuse (with disinhibition measures) using hierarchical factorial analyses for GWAS. In that study, McGue and colleagues (McGue et al., 2013) reported on 4 SNPs associated with multiple first order (e.g. alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, illicit drug dependence) and higher order externalizing factors. One of these SNPs, rs10037670 in GALNT10, with the highest association for illicit drug dependence factor (p=3.8×10−6) was modestly associated in this study with both ANYDEP (p=0.0029) and QUANTDEP (p=0.0067).
