The heritability of AUD is ~50% (Verhulst et al., 2014), suggesting that an in-depth understanding of the underlying genetic causes of AUD could greatly facilitate risk diagnosis and possibly successful treatment of affected individuals. Although genetic linkage, association, and other types of studies have generated suggestive evidence implicating a large number of genes in AUD or related disorders, to date, only genes encoding several major enzymes involved in the metabolic disposition of alcohol (ADH1A, ADH1B, ADH1C, and ALDH2) have been causally associated with AUD in multiple studies (Edenberg and Foroud, 2013, 2014; Rietschel and Treutlein, 2013). Thus, despite the significant negative health consequences of AUD and its heritability, we do not yet have a detailed understanding of the genes that drive alcohol abuse and other disorders related to problematic alcohol consumption.
