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Abstract
There is strong evidence of a positive association between cigarette and alcohol consumption. We tested whether smoking is likely to increase alcohol consumption using a genetic variant (rs1051730/rs16969968) which increases smoking heaviness in four studies: UK Biobank, ALSPAC, HUNT and the Copenhagen General Population Study. Whilst we saw a strong association between self-reported smoking and alcohol consumption, there was little evidence that the smoking increasing variant was associated with alcohol consumption in smokers. Previously reported associations between smoking and alcohol are unlikely to be causal, and may be the result of confounding and/or reverse causation.