We searched in PubMed and reviewed 45 GWASs of alcohol dependence (i.e., “alcoholism”, “alcohol dependence” and “alcohol addiction”). All diagnoses met DSM-IV criteria for alcohol dependence. The vast majority of GWASs produced results that were not significant at genome-wide level and were not replicated in any other studies and thus were not presented in this study. Only the following three types of results that had odd ratios, directions of effects and p values in these papers were selected and presented in Table 1: 1) genome-wide significant associations (p<5×10−8) in an individual sample, the combined samples of heterogeneous samples by controlling for admixture, or the meta-analysis of completely independent samples; 2) top-ranked associations in an individual sample (p<10−5) that were nominally replicated (at individual marker level) in other samples (p<0.05); or 3) nominally replicable associations across at least three independent GWAS samples (p<0.05). The ethnicity of each sample is shown in Table 1. Except for the Australian samples (10, 11) and an American sample (12) that were family-based, all samples were case-control designed. Most studies controlled three covariates including sex, age and principal components (PCs) of ancestries in association analysis (data not shown).
