Possible linkage between alcoholism and esterase-D

Association and linkage relationships between alcoholism and 30 polymorphic marker loci were studied in a total of 42 families: 27 families originally collected as part of a study on depression spectrum disease, 14 previously reported families with depression spectrum disease, and 1 family with familial alcoholism. Since heterogeneity within a sample can confound genetic linkage analysis, obscuring linkage relationships, alcoholism was studied in these families as a disorder unrelated to depression or antisocial personality. No allelic associations were found to be significant after allowing for the multiple tests. In a sib-pair linkage analysis, significant differences between the mean proportion of genes identical by descent in concordant and discordant sib pairs were found for the esterase-D (ESD) marker locus (p less than or equal to .01). This suggested that a linkage may exist between a gene for alcoholism and the ESD locus on chromosome 13q. Lod score linkage analysis yielded odds in favor of linkage to ESD of 44 to 1, most of the information relevant to linkage residing in a single family in which three offspring were classified as alcoholic and five were not.