drinking) bears a direct relationship to decline in several cognitive measures (15). Studies of large database samples, including the UK Biobank (4), have focused on alcohol consumption and their findings have implications for AD risk. Associations with variants mapped to genes that encode alcohol metabolizing enzymes – generally ADH1B variants in European- and African-ancestry (EUR and AFR) subjects (16, 17) as well as ALDH2*rs671 (18) in Asians – have been observed consistently. Some studies have reported associations at other loci with various alcohol-related traits (2, 4, 8); these reports are comparatively few. One meta-analysis of alcohol drinking (>105,000 EUR individuals) identified associations of daily alcohol intake with KLB, GCKR, and CDH13 (8). The GWAS of alcohol consumption in the UK Biobank sample (4) of >112,000 is the largest to date; this study considered only EUR subjects, and the phenotype was based on average weekly alcohol consumption. Genome-wide significant (GWS) associations were identified at several alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) loci, in addition to other loci including GCKR, CADM2, and FAM69C.
