SELF-REPORTED ALCOHOL INTAKE USING 2 DIFFERENT QUESTION FORMATS IN SOUTHEASTERN NEW-ENGLAND

Background. Quantitative measures of alcohol intake are not always ava ilable in population studies. Method. The authors evaluated whether a question on alcohol intake embedded within a general health survey cou ld be used as a surrogate marker for alcohol intake. We compared alcoh ol intake assessed with a food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) with alco hol intake assessed with a simple dichotomous survey question in a pop ulation-based sample. Results. The study population consisted of 755 m en and 1164 women from two communities in southeastern New England in the USA. There was strong agreement between the two alcohol questions for the classification of nondrinkers (98.1%). When participants were classified according to the quantity of alcohol consumed on the FFQ, t he ability of the simple question to identify drinkers improved in a d ose-response fashion. The Kappa statistic was 0.08 (P < 0.001), 0.38 ( P < 0.001), and 0.81 (P < 0.001) for low, medium, and high consumers o f alcohol, respectively. Conclusions. These results suggest that the s urvey alcohol question provides a useful qualitative measure of catego rizing nondrinkers and identifying drinkers who consume more than one drink per day. In population studies where quantitative measures of al cohol intake may not be available a survey alcohol question may prove useful when alcohol intake is likely to confound results, and adjustme nt of the data is needed.