Blood-based epigenome-wide association study and prediction of alcohol consumption

This dataset corresponds to the study “Blood-based epigenome-wide association study and prediction of alcohol consumption”. Files within this dataset include summary statistics for two Epigenome-wide association studies (EWASs) of alcohol consumption in Generation Scotland. One EWAS was conducted on only participants who's answer to alcohol consumption questionnaire reflected their normal drinking pattern. The other EWAS was performed on all participants with data available.
Abstract:
Alcohol consumption is an important risk factor for multiple diseases. It is typically assessed via self-report, which is open to measurement error through recall bias. Instead, molecular data such as blood-based DNA methylation (DNAm) could be used to derive a more objective measure of alcohol consumption by incorporating information from cytosine-phosphate-guanine (CpG) sites known to be linked to the trait. Here, we explore the epigenetic architecture of self-reported weekly units of alcohol consumption in the Generation Scotland study. We first create a blood-based epigenetic score (EpiScore) of alcohol consumption using elastic net penalised linear regression. We explore the effect of pre-filtering for CpG features ahead of elastic net, as well as differential patterns by sex and by units consumed in the last week relative to an average week. The final EpiScore was trained on 16,717 individuals and tested in four external cohorts: the Lothian Birth Cohorts (LBC) of 1921 and 1936, the Sister Study, and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (total N across studies > 10,000). The maximum Pearson correlation between the EpiScore and self-reported alcohol consumption within cohort ranged from 0.41 to 0.53. In LBC1936, higher EpiScore levels had significant associations with poorer global brain imaging metrics, whereas self-reported alcohol consumption did not. Finally, we identified two novel CpG loci via a Bayesian penalized regression epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) of alcohol consumption. Together, these findings show how DNAm can objectively characterize patterns of alcohol consumption that associate with brain health, unlike self-reported estimates.