This concern led the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) to sponsor a workshop in January 2013 that brought together a small group of researchers to discuss these challenges and provide recommendations for how to move the field forward. Those discussions formed the foundation for this paper, in which we review a number of reasons why the existing cGxE literature should be considered with a degree of caution. This is not to imply that true discoveries are absent in the literature. However, there are reasons to be concerned about the methods employed and the conclusions drawn from many cGxE studies. Drawing from accumulating findings in psychiatric genomics1, we consider potential pitfalls and logical inconsistencies with some of the extant cGxE literature. We discuss ways of refining the development of cGxE hypotheses, conducting statistically rigorous analyses, and interpreting findings within the broader context of genetics research – all directions that we believe hold promise for advancing the potential of cGxE studies to contribute more robustly to the understanding of complex behavioral phenotypes.
