Despite the significant genetic overlap between the AUDIT-C and AUD diagnosis, downstream analyses revealed biologically meaningful points of divergence. The AUDIT-C yielded some GWS findings that did not overlap with those for AUD, which reflects genetic independence of the traits. This broadens our previous observations using SNPs in ADH1B, in which we validated the AUDIT-C score as an alcohol-related phenotype33. In that study, after accounting for the effects of AUDIT-C score, AUD diagnoses accounted for unique variance in the frequency of ADH1B minor alleles.
