Developmental perspectives have long stressed the importance of accounting for temporality and life course variation in models of substance abuse. A primary insight of such perspectives is that the importance of various risk factors fluctuates across developmental trajectories (Adkins et al., 2012; Willett et al., 1998). The current study endeavors to wed this perspective to genomic approaches to alcohol consumption. While psychiatric genetics has made advances toward elucidating the link between genetic variation and alcohol involvement, this research has largely been atemporal. The weakness of such static perspectives on the genetic determinants of alcohol involvement is highlighted not only by developmental perspectives, but also by research within genetics showing that epigenetic mechanisms (i.e., methylation, histone modification and chromatin remodeling) regulate gene expression in response to developmental and environmental cues (Whitelaw & Whitelaw, 2006). Using the GEDI GWAS samples, this longitudinal GWAS meta-analysis has addressed the issue of developmental variation in genetic influences across adolescence and young adulthood through genome-wide testing of common variant effects on longitudinal measures of alcohol consumption, employing FDR methods to control the risk of false discoveries.
