than in individuals of European ancestry (<1%) and Hispanics (3%) (Gelernter et al., 1999). Ethnic differences have been shown to affect haplotype construction for OPRM1 leading to diverse haplotype structures found for a primarily Caucasian sample (Oroszi et al., 2009), as compared to a sample of American Indians (Ehlers et al., 2008). While it remains unclear how alcohol-dependent African Americans and those in other ethnic groups respond to naltrexone overall, population effect and allele frequency considerations might be of particular importance as the field of pharmacogenetics (and genomics) progresses. These issues may have important implications for health disparities in the era of personalized medicine (Tate and Goldstein, 2004).
