The sample for the present study was drawn from a recent follow-up assessment study [44,45] of participants from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA) [46,47,48]. Since its inception in 1989, COGA has collected multimodal data, primarily from families that are densely affected with AUD who were identified through probands in treatment for alcohol use problems, along with a relatively smaller subset of data from community comparison families. Participants aged 50 or older who met the lifetime criteria for alcohol dependence, as assessed with the Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics of Alcohol (SSAGA) [49,50], were drawn from data collected at six COGA sites. Since the study participants in the COGA sample represent a high-risk sample comprising many high-density families with multiple individuals affected with AUD in higher proportions than the general population, the findings from the current study may not be readily generalizable to other populations. Nonetheless, datasets enriched for specific clinical outcomes, such as the COGA data enriched for AUD, provide an excellent opportunity for identifying markers and predictors of these outcomes of interest. However, replication studies
