{"doi":"10.1176/appi.ajp.20240885","title":"What Are the Genetic Building Blocks of Alcohol-Related Behaviors?","abstract":"Alcohol use is ubiquitous across most societies, and many alcohol use traits, from regular drinking to alcohol use disorder (AUD), are common, or at least common enough to cause problems to individuals and to society that are widely recognized.People use alcohol for many reasons, and they experience its effects and consequences in different waysthere is a high degree of heterogeneity, both in terms of individual susceptibility, and in terms of environmental influences.AUD is treated with a range of methodologies, from participation in organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous to various types of psychotherapy to pharmacological treatments.The success of treatment is variable, and it is hard to predict who might benefit from any particular treatment.It would be very helpful to resolve some of the biological heterogeneity that underlies this set of traits.If we could understand interindividual differences in alcohol use biology, this might lead to improvements in prevention and treatment.Accordingly, there have been many efforts to identify subtypes of alcohol use traits, with phenotype-based typologies going back decades, such as \"type 1 versus type 2\" (1) and \"type A versus type B\" (2).While these were of interest, they have not found additional support in the genomics era.We would really like to know, What are the basic traits that, taken individually or in combination, make up the set of observed alcohol use traits?The data available in the pre-genomics era didn't provide enough information to answer this very complex question.Those of us who work in genetics have long held out the hope that with better understanding of genetics, we could develop improved typologies of alcohol use behaviors (AUBs), with better biological relevance, and a study from Savage et al. in this issue of the Journal (3) moves us closer to this goal.Indeed, studies in alcohol use genetics-principally, genome-wide association studies (GWASs)-have already resulted in major advances in our understanding of alcohol use phenotypes, such as separating quantity and frequency of use","journal":"American Journal of Psychiatry","year":2024,"id":483796,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9496,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":813452,"name":"Joseph D. Deak","orcid":"0000-0002-0540-6080","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230005,"name":"Joel Gelernter","orcid":"0000-0002-4067-1859","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":14,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:07:33.718973Z","pmid":"39482951","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}