For alcoholism, published GWAS studies have been seriously underpowered so that accumulation of many more alcohol dependent cases with GWAS will be necessary. Our secondary analyses of current (12-month) alcohol consumption measures, which had effect sizes and p-values comparable to those for heaviest drinking period, also provide some limited grounds for hope that large scale cross-study analyses will ultimately be successful in identifying some of the variants that contribute to consumption differences, and thus indirectly to differences in dependence risk. Current though not heaviest period alcohol consumption measures will have been obtained in studies of many medical phenotypes as part of a dietary assessment (e.g. food frequency questionnaires, (47)), albeit typically using truncated scales that do not well characterize individuals with highly elevated consumption levels, and in older age-groups whose consumption may have declined substantially from their heaviest drinking period. Still, accumulating such data on one hundred thousand or more individuals (necessary to detect effect sizes of the order of 0.001% [one tenth of one percent] of the variance with reasonable power) would be feasible. The immediate clinical value of
