A recent study in individuals of European ancestry who suffer from alcohol dependence and children of high risk failed to detect any significant associations between individual SNPs or haplotypes in the CRHR1 gene with the alcohol-dependent phenotype by the DSM-IV criteria (Treutlein et al., 2006). However, in the same study, an association was found between two SNPs, rs242938 in intron 3 and rs1876831 in intron 6 regions of the CRHR1 gene, and lifetime binge drinking and lifetime prevalence of drunkenness. In two other recent studies on individuals of European ancestry (Dahl et al., 2005; Soyka et al., 2004), no association was found between CRHR1 SNPs and alcohol dependence. Of note, these earlier mentioned studies tested a relatively small population, ranging from 120 to 299 alcohol-dependent individuals with a similar number of unaffected subjects. Two of these three studies analyzed only 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
