due to comorbid conditions or medication use. In addition, participants included in the present study may be healthier and/or more affluent than the general population, as they are all members of the KPNC health plan. We recognize that our restriction to study common variants (MAF ≥ 1%) cannot exclude the possibility that rare functional variants may contribute to variation in alcohol consumption. Despite these limitations, our study is based on a unique and very large cohort of individuals, who were all members of a single integrated delivery system. Participants were recruited in a similar manner, and were assessed for their alcohol consumption using a single questionnaire providing more consistency, in contrast to consortia which often include different questions across studies. Samples were genotyped on a single platform, overall allowing us to confirm previous associations with the most established alcohol consumption-related risk variants in terms of effect size and direction.
