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An epidemiological survey of alcohol use disorders in a Tibetan population
Two groups of volunteers were recruited for this study: the clinical sample encompassed 70 alcoholics from alcoholism treatment units (mean age 43.22 ± 9.91; M/F: 57/13; years of education 11.96 ± 3.91) and healthy control group contained 74 subjects from general population (mean age 38.33 ± 11.58; M/F: 43/31; years of education: 13.77 ± 2.96).
All subjects were assessed by AUDIT Core (the first 10 questions) and AUDADIS (Alcohol Use Disorders and Associated Disabilities Interview Schedule) developed by Grant & Hasin (1991) from National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse-Rockville USA.
The discriminant validity of the AUDIT was performed determining the ability of this instrument to differentiate alcoholics vs non-alcoholics and various alcoholism diagnostic criteria vs non-criteria. The cutoff point of AUDIT score is the true threshold between the categories above mentioned.
The AUDIT score of 10 is a good cutoff point discriminating between alcoholics vs non-alcoholics diagnosticated according to AUDADIS algorythm (kappa = 0.81, sensitivity/specificity: 90.6/90.6) and between non-criteria and harmful (kappa = 0.65, sensit./specif.: 83.5/81.0), tolerance (kappa = 0.40, sensit./specif. 67.0/72.9), neglecting interests (kappa = 0.51, sensit./specif. 63.5/91.5), and withdrawal/relief (kappa = 0.71, sensit./specif. 88.2/83.0) criteria.
This study highlights that AUDIT is a suitable instrument that is able to distinguish between alcoholics and non-alcoholics and fournishes confident thresholds outlining diagnostic criteria. Contrary, AUDIT is not able to differentiate between harmful and dependency, the diagnostic categories from ICD-10.
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An epidemiological survey of alcohol use disorders in a Tibetan population