AUD has a polygenic architecture, meaning that it includes the effects of many variants of small magnitude across the genome [121, 122]. The advent of low-cost genome-wide genotyping has made it possible to measure polygenic risk for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and polygenic approaches have shown predictive power in instances where no single marker meets the stringent genome-wide significance threshold [123]. Polygenic approaches can be easily applied to studies of endophenotypes to test whether polygenic risk scores for candidate endophenotypes also show association with AUD [124].
