Recently, (Zeiger et al., 2008) demonstrated that the CHRNB3-CHRNA6 cluster is associated with early subjective responses to tobacco in adolescents. One of their most significant results is tagged by rs4950 in CHRNB3; this SNP is significantly associated with nicotine dependence in our sample (p = 0.00010) and is in the LD bin tagged by rs13277254 (r2 = 0.995). This concordance of genetic findings for these two phenotypes suggests that subjective effects may mediate the association between this locus and addiction, and raises the possibility that early interventions may be effective in disrupting this particular pathway leading to increased addiction risk.
