In summary, we provide evidence that for alcohol dependence, several extensively studied candidate loci and genes are not replicated in a large GWA study, indicating that these variants do not individually have a large contribution to risk of developing alcohol dependence in European and African ancestry populations. Our analysis was unable to rule out the possibility that some variants and genes are important for risk of alcoholism due to lack of coverage. Recent work demonstrates that at least one highly reported variant rs1229984 in ADH1B that is not reported in SAGE is significantly associated with alcoholism (Bierut et al., 2011), suggesting the possible importance of further research on highly supported variants that cannot be assessed in SAGE. Our approach may also have missed variants that have a real but small individual contribution to overall inheritance of alcoholism.
