Our study design had several strengths. First, the literature search for candidate genes included all genetic associations irrespective of ethnicity and criteria for alcoholism. By including all genes with the most genetic association study publications, we comprehensively examined previously identified genes associated with alcoholism in a large GWA study on alcoholism. Second, the SAGE dataset has the power to detect associations of small magnitude. SAGE included more than 3,800 subjects and had 90% power to detect a genetic variant with an odds ratio of 1.25 for a risk locus with 10% minor allele frequency. Third, our findings in SAGE regarding the well-characterized loci were found to be very similar to the results in the three independent datasets that contributed to SAGE, which indicates that there is no heterogeneity across these datasets. Fourth, our approach used data that is available to the scientific community and can be easily replicated in future studies of other phenotypes.
