We sought to identify linkage regions for an alcohol dependence symptom score in a large community sample of Australian adults. Although none of our findings achieve genomewide levels of significance, our LOD scores greater than 2.0 are in a region on chromosome 5 previously linked to alcohol-related traits (e.g. Schuckit et al., 2001). The current findings suggest that genes in this region may influence alcohol-related problems ranging from mild through to the severe problems typically found in a clinical sample. Further, our results indicate, as previously found for alcohol consumption (Hansell et al., 2009), that the linkage method is sensitive to relatively small differences in inclusion criteria. In this case, variations in participant age and drinking status led to peak variation.
