CAGE is an initialism that stands for cut-annoyed-guilty-eye which is a screening questionnaire used in identifying potential alcohol problems. The tool is popular in screening risk or hazardous alcohol indulgence. The instrument comprises of four questions that clinicians can use to assess alcohol dependency signs in an individual.
As Basu, Ghosh, Hazari and Parakh (2016), explain, sensitivity and specificity are two psychometric properties of the CAGE assessment tool. The two characteristics are measures of the tool’s validity. Sensitivity is the capacity of the CAGE tool to correctly identify positive subjects or individuals who have alcohol dependency problems ( Malet et al., 2005) . Sensitivity measures the percentage of individuals with alcoholism condition correctly identified as having a hazardous drinking behaviour. CAGE sensitivity score in various populations varies from 77 to 99%.
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Specificity is the capacity of CAGE to correctly identify individuals who are negative on the criteria among the persons who are found not to have alcoholism behaviour. It is the percentage of patients without the risky drinking behaviour who are correctly identified as unaffected by alcoholism ( Ögel, Koç & Görücü, 2017) . CAGE specificity values range from 77 to 96%.
It is usually appropriate to use CAGE tool in primary care and general care setting in instances where a person has developed a hazardous alcoholism behaviour. The tool can used in a specific population where a group of people are found to drink excessively thereby needing treatment.
Psychopharmacology medications are drugs administered in countering mental health adverse impacts. CAGE assessment tool cannot be used in evaluation of psychopharmacologic medication efficacy but can only be applied in identification of the specific drug use rather than effectiveness of their medications ( Tiet et al., 2015) . The questions on the CAGE assessment tool uses sensitivity and specificity scores which are only able to identify users and non-users but not to gauge the efficiency of the psychopharmacologic medications.
References
Basu, D., Ghosh, A., Hazari, N., & Parakh, P. (2016). Use of Family CAGE-AID questionnaire to screen the family members for diagnosis of substance dependence. The Indian journal of medical research , 143 (6), 722.
Malet, L., Schwan, R., Boussiron, D., Aublet-Cuvelier, B., & Llorca, P. M. (2005). Validity of the CAGE questionnaire in hospital. European Psychiatry , 20 (7), 484-489.
Ögel, K., Koç, C., & Görücü, S. (2017). Study on development, validity and reliability of a risk-screening questionnaire for alcohol and drug use. Psychiatry and Clinical Psychopharmacology , 27 (2), 164-172.
Tiet, Q. Q., Leyva, Y. E., Moos, R. H., Frayne, S. M., Osterberg, L., & Smith, B. (2015). Screen of drug use: diagnostic accuracy of a new brief tool for primary care. JAMA internal medicine , 175 (8), 1371-1377.
