Binge Drinking - Diagnosis

Diagnosis

For the purpose of identifying an alcohol use disorder when assessing binge drinking, using a time frame of the past 6 months eliminates false negatives. For example it has been found that using a narrow 2 week window for assessment of binge drinking habits leads to 30 percent of heavy regular binge drinkers wrongly being classed as not having an alcohol use disorder. However, the same researchers also note that recall bias is somewhat enhanced when longer timeframes are used.