We detected significant genetic correlations between all pairs of phenotypes, except for AD and AC-frequency, suggesting that frequency of AC is not a good proxy for AD. In contrast, the genetic correlation between AD and AC-quantity is high at rg = 0.75. Of note, our estimate is higher than previously reported by Walters et al. (rg = 0.37) who used the same GWAS results for AD (Walters et al., 2018) but the earlier, smaller subset of the UK Biobank data on consumption (Clarke et al., 2017). However, our estimate is comparable to the estimate reported by Walters et al. (rgAD−AC quantity = + 0.70) who calculated the genetic correlation between AD and AC from the Alcohol Genome-wide Association and Cohorts for Aging and Research in Genomic Epidemiology Plus consortium (Schumann et al., 2016), suggesting that the genetic correlation between these traits is indeed high (Walters et al., 2018).
