The publications included in the analysis were selected from both PubMed and the database of Chinese Academic Journals with keywords 'aldehyde dehydrogenase', ‘ALDH’, 'association', 'associated', 'drug’, 'substance', 'alcoholism’, 'alcohol’, 'alcoholics', 'heroin’, 'opiate', and 'opioid'. Both English and Chinese language keywords were used in searching the Chinese academic journals (the first author, who performed the search, is proficient in Chinese). All references cited in these studies and in published reviews were examined in order to identify additional works not indexed by the databases. The analyzed data cover all identified English and Chinese publications up to August 2010.
