Over the last decade, hundreds of candidate genes have been proposed for alcoholism. We used local and global approaches to specifically investigate variants within the most widely studied of previously proposed candidate genes. Our primary finding is that most of these candidate genes are not strongly supported by GWA data. This observation reduces the likelihood that these previously proposed genes individually have a strong effect on the genetic risk of alcohol dependence. The results mirror prior work that most candidate loci in common diseases are not strongly replicated in GWA studies except for a few biologically important variants (Siontis et al., 2010; Obeidat et al., 2011).
