01.09.2017 - 30.09.2019

Lausanne, Switzerland

Short screenings for alcohol use disorder are crucial for public health purposes, but current self-reported measures have several pitfalls and may be unreliable. The main aim of our study was to provide empirical evidence on the psychometric performance of self-reports currently used against a clinical interview of alcohol use disorder used as the gold standard. We also compared biomarkers of alcohol use to self-reported alcohol use.

Neither self-reported alcohol use disorder nor alcohol use appear to be adequate to screen for alcohol use disorder among young men from the Swiss population. The best screening alternative was a combination of eight symptoms and four alcohol-related consequences. Self-reported measures of previous twelve-month alcohol use and risky single occasion drinking were acceptable measures of excessive chronic drinking (assessed with biomarkers as the gold standard) for population-based screening.