In this study, we also identified two loci for alcohol consumption in our trans-ethnic meta-analysis. One of these loci was near KLB on chromosome 4 and showed the strongest association with alcohol consumption in our meta-analysis. The second locus with genome-wide significance was near GCKR on chromosome 2. Our findings are consistent with a recent study reporting genome-wide associations at those two loci with daily alcohol intake (log grams per day) in a large meta-analysis of Europeans,29 even though the strongest SNPs reported by Schumann et al. were different than ours. However, our lead SNPs at KLB and GCKR loci were relatively close to theirs (8.6 and 12.6 kb apart) and were moderately correlated in European ancestry populations (r2 ranged from 0.4 to 0.6). Our conditional analyses also indicated that our lead SNPs and theirs represent the same signals at those two loci, suggesting that all the identified SNPs (rs780094 and rs4665985 at GCKR, and rs11940694 and rs7686419 at KLB) are most likely proxies of causal variants influencing alcohol consumption.
