In parallel with these efforts, which have focused on clinical diagnoses, other GWAS have incorporated continuous measures of alcohol use. These include self-reported weekly alcohol intake or the scores from screening questionnaires such as the AUDIT (13). The AUDIT can be decomposed to provide a measure of alcohol use from the first 3 questions (AUDIT-C) and misuse from questions 4–10 (AUDIT-P). These quantitative measures are available in large population-based cohorts such as the UK Biobank (UKB), MVP and 23andMe. The GWAS meta-analysis of AUDIT identified 10 associated risk loci (14). Large consortia were also formed to collate quantitative measures of alcohol use, including AlcGen (15) and the GWAS & Sequencing Consortium of Alcohol and Nicotine Use (GSCAN). GSCAN have recently identified nearly 100 loci associated with alcohol consumption (17). The MVP study (18) also examined alcohol consumption, allowing for an explicit comparison between AUD and consumption in a single population; of the 18 loci detected in that study, 5 were common to both AUD diagnosis and alcohol consumption.
