Genetics of Alcohol Dependence in African Americans: Recruitment

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ABSTRACT Prevalent alcohol dependence (AD) in the United States, which has increased substantially over the past decade, is highly destructive and costly to individuals and to society. It is also moderately heritable. Delirium tremens (DTs) is a frequent, and often dangerous, consequence of acute alcohol withdrawal. We previously conducted an AD research project focused on the understudied African-American (AA) population and carried out numerous investigations including a pioneering genomewide association study (GWAS) of AD. We also reported GWAS of numerous related traits. Our findings included genomewide significant (GWS) risk loci associated to AD and related traits; our preliminary data support a risk locus for DTs at UNC13C (P= 9.4×10[-9]). Many significant findings, including the DT association, are seen exclusively in AAs. Additional recruitment of AA AD subjects with a state-of-the-art assessment is necessary. Deep phenotyping will make available other relevant related phenotypes, such as risky sexual behavior. New recruitment will build upon our existing sample to increase gene-mapping power not just for AD, but also for other substance use disorder (SUD) traits that are highly comorbid with AD in clinical populations. This resource will enable replication and a more detailed and broader investigation of identified associations. The focus on AA subjects will (a) help to address the well-recognized disparity in complex trait studies of this population; (b) allow us to follow-up GWAS results in the specific population where most of our significant results have been observed (pending future funding); and (c) increase power through greater homogeneity of the study sample. Our new subjects (pending future projects to allow genotyping and analysis based on the subjects to be collected here) will be added to the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium sample to improve the power of their SUD mega-analyses.