Another approach to finding consilience in measures of subjective responses to alcohol between rodents and humans may be the use of the Self Report of the Effects of Ethanol (SRE) questionnaire. The SRE was developed by Schuckit and is used to index the number of drinks necessary to produce a specific effect and is typically used as a retrospective report of the need for more drinks to experience the “effects” of alcohol during the development of AUD and AD (Schuckit et al. 1997a;Schuckit et al. 1997b). This measure was recently found to be more robust than results of the alcohol challenge in a regression analysis predicting AUD outcomes [see (Schuckit et al. 2009)]. It is possible that measures of the number of “drink equivalents” that an animal will take in a drinking paradigm might model the SRE measure in humans; then, the genetic contributions to sensitivity (e.g., QTLs, genetic correlations) for the two phenotypes could be compared. However, there remains the problem of establishing in rodents what the relevant behavioral end point might be that would cue the animal to stop drinking, which we discuss in the next section.
