The vast majority of genetic studies in AUD have been conducted in European-ancestry individuals. However, studies are increasingly also being conducted in African and Asian ancestry individuals. As shown in this review and for the reasons discussed, there have been only a limited number of genetic studies of AUD in AI/AN individuals from only a handful of tribes. It is not clear whether the results of these studies are generalizable to the hundreds of other federally recognized tribes that differ in many ways including culture, customs, language, alcohol use and prevalence of addictions13,15 and may differ in frequencies of genetic variants. Indeed, we showed that the frequency of the OPRM1 A118G G allele that predicts response to naltrexone varied from 0.18 to 0.31 amongst three AI tribes. Nevertheless, it is important to note that despite the fact that genetic variants have different frequencies in AI/AN and European-ancestry individuals, the results of candidate gene studies are largely similar in both groups. Extrapolating from these limited findings, it can be concluded that it is unlikely that the genetic backgrounds of AI/AN tribes
