Alcoholic consumption has for long being acknowledged as one of the leading causes of health related complications. As a result, it has become imperative to discourage the behaviour among the adult population. In order for this to be achieved, certain tests are conducted to detect alcoholic problems. Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) is one of the most common screening tests among the adult population as will be demonstrated in the section below.
The first thing that one can note about AUDIT is that it is only undertaken on adults. Secondly, the first three questions that are asked pertain to consumption of alcohol ( Babor et al., 2015 ). Also the AUDIT contains 10 items. It is a widely utilized mechanism for screening. Further still, this kind of screening has for long being utilized by the World Health Organization ( Connor, Haber & Hall, 2016 ). Some of the things that this test seeks to analyse is, abuse of alcohol, risky drinking behaviour and also dependence on alcoholic consumption. In addition to this, the people chosen for the study are mostly above 20 years. The questionnaire includes the name of the person and also their date of birth.
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Despite being very effective in a majority of cases, there is no doubt that the test has some limitations. The greatest disadvantage of the test is based on the idea that it is lengthy. This may turn out to be tedious task in many scenarios especially where accurate results are required within a short duration of time. This appears to be the reason why brief screening tests are highly valued compared to AUDIT. Some of considerations made while interpreting the AUDIT is whether the consumption of alcohol is low risk, risky, harmful, and severe ( Lundin et al., 2015 ). A brief moment is also taken with an aim of educating the individual or patient regarding the risks of indulging in alcohol. It is recommended that people minimize their consumption or abstain completely.
References
Babor, T. F., Higgins-Biddle, J. C., Saunders, J. B., & Monteiro, M. G. (2015). AUDIT: The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test. Guidelines for use in primary care. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization; 2001. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/67205/WHO_MSD_MSB_01.6a.pdf;jsessionid=01C88FCB1CCA3902C5EA91A6D8DA32B8?sequence=1 .
Connor, J. P., Haber, P. S., & Hall, W. D. (2016). Alcohol use disorders. The Lancet , 387 (10022), 988-998. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26343838
Lundin, A., Hallgren, M., Balliu, N., & Forsell, Y. (2015). The use of alcohol use disorders identification test (AUDIT) in detecting alcohol use disorder and risk drinking in the general population: validation of AUDIT using schedules for clinical assessment in neuropsychiatry. Alcoholism: clinical and experimental research , 39 (1), 158-165. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25623414
