Journal of Addiction Research & Therapy
Open Access

An alcohol screening test is a screening tool usually used to detect a person’s alcohol consumption, behavioral health and mental state of an individual, and complications faced by the addicts. The patients are asked to answer few questions like “Which type of alcoholic beverages do they usually drink?” “How often do they consume alcohol?” “At what amount do they consume?” “What are the reactions or how do they feel after consumption symptoms, etc.” In many cases, this tool has helped in detecting alcoholics/drug addicts in their initial stages of addiction. This test allows you to depict at which level of risk an individual is addicted. And once you get to know the stage of addiction, one can easily get precautious and could admire preventative measures to avoid further abuse or development of addiction.

Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test is a screening tool developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). This Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) is used to detect various addictive behaviors of a person. There will be a series of questions to be answered regarding their alcohol consumption, behaviors based on their consumption, and consequences based on this addiction. AUDIT can be examined by 2 types, by oneself or by under any clinician. This AUDIT can be done manually or the patients need to give responses to the questionnaire chart before attending the psychologist or rehabilitation therapist for the treatment. Using an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test cut off score of 8 and CDT cut off scores of 20 U/L in males and 27 U/L in females. There are many other drug or alcohol identification tests to detect the level of consumption of alcohol. And they are usually detected in biological samples like saliva, urine, blood, etc. Biomarkers like Carbohydrate deficient transferrin and phosphatide ethanol are used during this detection. Generally, with the help of breath examination, the amount of these alcohols are determined, they can easily be traced in the urine sample, and in few cases especially in alcohol overdose or drug overdose they can be traced in the blood sample. Results from the blood sample can easily detect ulcers and tissue damage liver, kidney, etc. At present days, due to the development in the technology even hair samples are also being used for the detection of alcohol consumption but this has a minute drawback that it could give data up to a couple of months.

Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score is used for giving a background marked by drug or alcohol use in the previous year, while no alcohol biomarker has this ability. Alcohol use disorder identification test score has its limitations. Patients might be hesitant to give an exact portrayal of past drinking history because of the social stigma and other public issues related to substantial consumption of drugs or alcohol. Accordingly, Alcohol use disorder identification test score and drug or alcohol biomarkers might be free in recognizing patients who might be going through excessive drug or alcohol consumption. The legitimacy of self-announcing might be improved in case it is utilized simultaneously along with a laboratory test, for example, drug or alcohol biomarker.

The authors are grateful to the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.