We hypothesized that a higher resolution of each of the alcohol phenotypes measured in AUDIT would further our understanding of the differences among indices of alcohol consumption (items 1–3) and problematic alcohol use (items 4–10), and how they relate to human health. We anticipated that the genetic contributions to alcohol consumption and problematic use would not be completely overlapping, and that genomic modeling using item-level data would ameliorate the confounding issues between alcohol consumption, AUD, and indices of health that complicated previous GWAS efforts.
