In collaboration with the genetics company 23andMe, Inc., we performed a GWAS for alcohol misuse using the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), a questionnaire developed to screen for alcohol misuse in the past year (Saunders et al. 1993). The estimated narrow-sense heritability of AUDIT dichotomous score is 60%, similar to the heritability of AUD (Mbarek et al. 2015). Self-reported AUDIT scores are predictive of future problematic drinking and higher AUD risk (Allen, Litten, Fertig & Babor 1997; Boschloo et al. 2010), with one study showing a high correlation (0.88) between AUDIT scores and AUD vulnerability (Bohn, Babor & Kranzler 1995). Indeed, high AUDIT scores (> 15) are consistent with a DSM-V diagnosis of severe AUD (Grant et al. 2015), perhaps because the AUDIT includes questions that are related to the criteria for AUD (e.g. DSM-V, criterion 2: “More than once wanted to cut down or stop drinking, or tried to, but couldn’t?” versus AUDIT, item 4: “How often during the last year have you found that you were not able to stop drinking once you had started?”). A previous
