It is well known that alcohol use disorder (AUD) is moderately heritable (Verhulst et al., 2015). Genomewide associations studies (GWAS) of alcohol dependence (AD) and habitual alcohol use have been completed in European (Gelernter et al., 2014, Mbarek et al., 2015, Clarke et al., 2017, Xu et al., 2015, Jorgenson et al., 2017) and African (Gelernter et al., 2014, Xu et al., 2015, Almli et al, 2017, Jorgenson et al., 2017) ancestry populations. Work in Asian ancestry populations is more limited, but we have completed a small GWAS in a Chinese population (Quillen et al., 2014), and other investigators have done so in Chinese (Yang et al., 2013), Koreans (Baik et al., 2011, Park et al., 2013), and Asian-Americans (Jorgenson et al., 2017). The most consistent findings have been associations with variants mapped to genes that encode alcohol metabolizing enzymes – most characteristically variants at ADH1B in European- and African-ancestry subjects (Li et al., 2011) and ALDH2*rs671 (and often ADH1B as well) in Asians (Li et al., 2012).
