Frank et al., 2012, conducted a GWAS of alcohol dependence in order to enlarge the sample size from the study by (Treutlein et al., 2009) in an attempt to increase statistical power (Frank et al., 2012). An additional 900 German cases and 862 controls were added to the GWAS by Treutlein et al., 2009 resulting in a combined sample of 1333 male DSM-IV alcohol dependent cases receiving treatment and 2168 control subjects. Frank et al., 2012 reported a genomewide significant SNP (rs1789891) association located between ADH1B and ADH1C, alcohol-metabolizing enzyme genes, that is in complete linkage disequilibrium with a nonsynomous SNP in ADH1C (rs1693482). The significant association with the ADH1B/1C genes is encouraging and likely has a clear functional implication related to the well described role of genetic variation in the alcohol metabolizing genes and risk for alcohol dependence. However, considering this significant finding alone does not take advantage of potentially informative and novel functional information from other top-ranking candidate genes. Several other of the top ranked SNPs (p < 10E-6) within or near SGCG, MSX1, and CMTM8 are described below with potential functional implications.
