Several large collaborative projects that strive to identify genes involved in AOD dependence currently are underway. The first large-scale project aimed at identifying genes contributing to alcohol dependence was the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)-sponsored Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA), which was initiated in 1989. This study, which involves collaboration of investigators at several sites in the United States, examines families with several alcohol-dependent members who were recruited from treatment centers across the United States. This study has been joined by several other gene identification studies focusing on families affected with alcohol dependence, including the following: A sample of Southwestern American Indians (Long et al. 1998);The Irish Affected Sib Pair Study of Alcohol Dependence (Prescott et al. 2005a);A population of Mission Indians (Ehlers et al. 2004);A sample of densely affected families collected in the Pittsburgh area (Hill et al. 2004); andAn ongoing data collection from alcohol-dependent individuals in Australia.
