Alcohol use and withdrawal

Questionnaire with four items; three of them explore the subjective aspects of the person in relation to alcohol use, and the last explores issues related to alcohol withdrawal.

"Rodríguez-Martos finds a good correlation coefficient with the MALT test and all items have excellent discriminative power 4.  With a cutoff of the 1 sensitivity is 0.86 to 0.90 and specificity of 0.52 to 0.93 and if the cutoff point is set to 2 the sensitivity descends to 0.78-0.81 and the specificity increases to 0.76-0.9612."

The questionnaire is applied through a personal interview. It can be administered by auxiliary previously trained personnel.

It provides a total score that is obtained by adding the scores of the 4 items. In each item, an affirmative answer is worth 1 point and a negative one 0. The authors recommend using the following cutoffs: 0, no alcohol problems; 1 indications of problems with alcohol; 2-4, alcohol dependence.

"JA Ewing, Rouse BA. Identifying the hidden alcoholic. Presented at the 29th International Congress on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, Sydney, Australia, Feb, 3, 1970. Ewing JA. Detecting alcoholism: the CAGE questionnaire. JAMA 1984; 252: 1905-7."