Interestingly, one study found that the genetic association between AUDIT-C and AD was initially negative, but became positive when the ‘healthy volunteer’ effect that tends to occur in alcohol frequency data was taken into account (Mallard et al., 2021). Thus, in cases where the associations between alcohol consumption frequency and alcohol consumption quantity and other phenotypes are in opposing directions, this may be because the frequency item is positively genetically correlated with high SES (Mallard & Sanchez-Roige, 2021; Marees et al., 2020). Another potential explanation for the negative association between consumption and other psychopathology-related outcomes may be related to the finding that some with greater disease burden have in turn, reduced or limited their alcohol consumption (Xue et al., 2020). Our study is the first to observe a negative genetic correlation between PTSD and alcohol consumption phenotypes, among those of EA. Findings from this study, together with the previous literature on genetic correlations between other psychiatric disorders and problematic v. typical alcohol use, consistently indicate that problematic alcohol use and more typical alcohol use are genetically associated with other psychiatric
