In this study, we sought to examine the extent to which PRS derived from the AUDIT-C and AUDIT-P GWAS predicted variance in multiple aspects of alcohol use and misuse, ranging from levels of alcohol consumption, hazardous drinking, and AUD, in four independent samples that vary in their age and ascertainment scheme. PRS are scores that represent an individual’s genetic liability for a certain trait or disorder, created by aggregating the effects of many risk variants for the phenotype of interest, weighting the effect sizes by the number of effect alleles an individual carries at each locus. Prior evidence indicates that association between PRS and phenotype in the target sample is improved when both the discovery and target samples for PRS analyses are derived using similar ascertainment strategies (Savage et al., 2018). Based on a study showing positive correlations between psychopathology and AUDIT-P (but not AUDIT-C; Sanchez-Roige et al., 2018), we hypothesized that AUDIT-P PRS would be more closely related to liability to AUD than would AUDIT-C PRS, which would be more closely related to aspects of alcohol consumption (e.g., regular
