The long non-coding RNA (LncRNA) (>200nt) proximate to each risk gene was explored in NCBI dbSNP and UCSC Genome Browser databases. Associations between SNPs located within these LncRNAs and alcohol dependence were tested in three datasets. These datasets included one European-American SAGE+COGA cohort (1,409 cases with alcohol dependence and 1,518 controls), one African-American SAGE+COGA cohort (681 cases and 508 controls) (dbGaP# phs000092.v1.p1 and phs000125.v1.p1) and one African-American Yale cohort (1429 cases and 498 controls) (dbGaP# phs000425.v1.p1) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gap). Affected subjects met lifetime DSM-IV criteria for alcohol dependence (21). All subjects gave written informed consent to participating in protocols approved by the relevant institutional review boards (IRBs). All subjects were de-identified in this study that was approved by Yale IRB. Detailed demographic information for these cohorts is available elsewhere (22–29). The SAGE+COGA and Yale cohorts were genotyped on the Illumina Human 1M and HumanOmni1_Quad_v1-0_B beadchips, respectively. The association analysis was performed using unconditional logistic regression models implemented in PLINK (30). Diagnosis and alleles each served as the dependent and independent variables, respectively, with sex, age and the first 10 principal components (PCs)
