The future of genetic studies potentially may help people understand their personal risks and potential treatments for disease. The strongest genetic contributors to alcohol dependence to date are related to the pharmacologic responses to alcohol represented by variations in alcohol-metabolizing genes. This knowledge represents the first level of genetic understanding, and researchers now are poised to move to the next level with the identification of additional genes that contribute to alcoholism. Several challenges remain, however, as this field moves forward. First, investigators must increase the diversity of the populations under study. Varying allele frequencies across populations mean that important genetic contributors in one population may not be seen in another, with the classic example being the variation in the alcohol-metabolizing genes that contributes to alcohol dependence. Increasing diversity in the populations under study will allow researchers to leverage these differences to refine association signals and also to increase the potential discovery of genetic variants. A second challenge is to integrate the findings from candidate gene studies and GWASs. The results from these two methods only have converged modestly, primarily with
