Craving, reflecting strong desire or urge to use a drug, is being proposed for inclusion in DSM-5. In the present analyses, while we did not identify any genomewide association signals for craving, we found that a number of SNPs that were associated with alcohol craving at p-values less than 1 × 10−6 also showed nominal association with DSM-IV alcohol dependence, but not with dependence excluding craving. Several SNPs in dopamine-related genes did exhibit differing results when comparing craving and DSM-IV alcohol dependence albeit at far lower levels of statistical significance. While imposing a high statistical threshold yielded significant overlap across SNPs for craving and for alcohol dependence, lowering this threshold and specifically focusing on genes of a priori interest indicated potential biological specificity for craving.
