Our failure to confirm the earlier report (Treutlein J et al. 2006) of a significant main effect for rs1876831 on lifetime prevalence of (any) binge drinking and drunkenness in their adolescent sample and on alcohol intake in clinically-ascertained alcoholic adults may have resulted from disparity in the two studies’ outcome measures. The ACFS (Agrawal et al. 2009; Grant et al. 2009) used in this study is an estimate of consumption that is primarily based on the period of heaviest lifetime use. The main effects reported in the adolescent sample (Treutlein et al. 2006) were for two very early drinking career milestones, any episode of binge drinking or drunkenness. In their clinical sample, the significant main effect was for consumption of >250 g ethanol daily prior to admission, a binary measure of daily consumption much later in the course of the disorder that could be affected by various covariates (eg, gender, ADH genotype, alcoholic liver disease). Another study (Dahl et al. 2005) examined whether CRHR1 polymorphisms were associated with alcohol dependence risk in European American alcoholics found no association for any SNPs including those informative for the H2 haplotype.
