our GWAS signals for craving do not appear to be entirely attributable to the high degree of overlap between craving and severity of alcohol dependence. There needs to be a continued effort to examine candidate genes that may be particularly relevant to craving – while we explore one major family of genes in this study, multiple others in GABA-ergic, glutamatergic and opioidergic pathways have also been posited as participating in the neurobiology of craving (Kalivas & Volkow, 2005). While we could not conclude the extent to which the specificity of our association signals for the dopamine genes was due to false positive or negative findings, future studies may wish to focus on these genes with additional measures of craving.
