these associations survived correction for multiple testing in the two African American samples [18], [28]. Although there were two studies investigating potential associations of variants in the gene cluster with LC and smoking in Chinese [44] and Japanese [45] subjects, no previous reports have examined the involvement of variants of this cluster with smoking behavior in a strictly Asian sample. Therefore, this study represents the first report on a potential association of the CHRNA5/A3/B4 cluster with smoking behaviors in an Asian population. By identifying risk alleles for smoking and LC and comparing their frequencies in different ethnic populations, it is easy to see that they are quite different, which further underscores that different variants in this genomic region contribute importantly to variations in disease risks among different ethnic populations [12].
