the clinical diagnosis of alcohol dependence by DSM-IV. Only the Treutlein and colleagues (2006) study, which also had the largest sample size of 299 alcohol-dependent individuals, further characterized the specific patterns of alcohol consumption with which an association of two SNPs in the CRHR1 gene was found. Only two of the SNPs tested in those three studies correspond to the 10 SNPs in our study; rs1396862 in intron 4 and rs878887 in the un-translated region of Exon 13 were included in the studies by Dahl and colleagues (2005) and by Treutlein and colleagues (2006). In addition to the heterogeneity of alcohol dependence, these factors may also contribute to the reasons why these three recent studies failed to identify significant association between SNPs in CRHR1 and alcohol dependence.
