alcoholism (Edenberg and Foroud, 2006, Fehr et al., 2006) and brain oscillations (Edenberg et al., 2004). Motivated by our previous finding (Villafuerte et al., 2012) and by a recent report in a sample of college students where higher scores on the urgency (impulsiveness) scale predicted alcohol problems but not alcohol use (Magid and Colder, 2007), we conducted association analyses of GABRA2 variation with both impulsiveness and alcohol problems. Previously, we reported moderate associations of two of these GABRA2 SNPs with higher percentage of alcoholic symptoms (Villafuerte et al., 2012). Some of the items on that measure overlap to a small degree with items comprising one component of LAPS, thus forecasting the association we report here. Our results suggest that genetic variation in GABRA2 in the region comprising intron 3 to intron 4 may influence both level of impulsiveness and also level of alcohol problems. Notably, the association of GABRA2 is stronger with Impulsiveness than with alcohol problems, showing that an intermediate trait such as a personality trait is closer to the genetic influence, hence to the biology, than the manifestation of alcohol problems which are the result of several factors.
