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 GWAS of dichotomized AUDIT scores in 7,842 individuals in an unselected Dutch population did not reveal any significant associations (Mbarek et al. 2015). Here, to maximize power and to capture the dimensionality of alcohol misuse, we treated AUDIT scores from 20,328 research participants as a continuous trait rather than dichotomizing it by using a threshold score. We hypothesized that a GWAS for AUDIT scores might identify some of the same alleles that influence AUD, even though our cohort had relatively modest AUDIT scores.
