We examined results for the eight independent variants associated at GWS levels with alcohol consumption in the UK Biobank17 (Supplementary Table S7). Among the UK Biobank findings, three of the four reported variants in the ADH region of chromosome 4 (rs145452708 – a proxy for rs1229984 with D’=1, rs29001570 and rs35081954) were associated in the present study with AD (p ranging from 3.5E-5 – 2.3E-10) with sign concordant effects; the remaining variant was excluded from our analysis due to MAF < 0.01. The UK Biobank lead variant in KLB, rs11940694, was nominally associated with AD (p = 0.0097), though this does not surpass multiple testing correction for the eight GWS alcohol consumption loci. We see little evidence (p > 0.2) for association of AD with the reported loci at GCKR and CADM2, which may be due to differences in power for the given effect size or because these genes exert an influence on liability to consume alcohol but not later problems. The locus on chromosome 18 showed limited regional association with AD, but the index variant was not present in our analysis because it no longer appears in the 1000 Genomes Phase 3 reference panel21.
