The ISCA (Systematic Interview of Alcohol Consumption), a new instrument to detect risky drinking

BACKGROUND: The World Health Organisation Collaborative Project on Alcohol and Primary Health Care has stressed the need to develop standardised scree ning tools to enable early identification. The aim of this study was to dev elop a new systematic tool to register alcohol consumption and to validate its usefulness in order to detect risky drinking in primary health care set tings. SUBJECTS AND METHOD: The Systematic Interview of Alcohol Consumption (ISCA) was administered together with the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Te st (AUDIT), which was used as main external criterium, to 255 patients who attended 5 primary health care centers. RESULTS: The correlation between both procedures was highly positive and si gnificant (r = 0.831; p < 0.001). The cut-off scores (> 28 for men and > 17 for women) showed an ISCA sensitivity rank to detect risky drinking of 70- 81% for men and 46-100% for women. The ISCA specificity ranks were 82-99% a nd 97-100%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The ISCA seems to be useful to detect risky drinking and it is easy to administer ! by primary health care professionals. ISCA and AUDIT can be used indistinctly and complementarily.