Published first-generation case-control genomewide association studies of alcoholism have yielded generally disappointing findings. They have not achieved the robustly replicated associations seen using quantitative smoking phenotypes, for example, between the CHRNA3/CHRNA5/CHRNB4 gene complex and heaviness of smoking (23,24,25). Here we report results of a GWA study using a different research strategy, that seeks to take advantage of the quantitative information that can be obtained for heaviness of alcohol consumption (as operationalized in (14)) and for alcoholism symptom severity. This is the first study to apply a genome-wide association approach to a quantitative measure of alcoholism risk in the general community, and potentially complements the clinical case-control studies.
