Alcohol screening cutoffs may differ by age and sex
Suggested cutoffs ranged from 2 points for women aged 80 and older to 6 points for men aged 20–64.
Our read
Biomarkers- Studied:
- Cohort study of 95,477 adults in Finland, 5‐year follow‐up, against men aged 20-64
- What changed:
- Cutoffs predicting alcohol-related harm were 2 points for women aged ≥80 versus 6 points for men aged 20-64
- The catch:
- Comorbidities and medications were unaccounted for and could alter cutoffs, especially in older adults
- In the record:
- The 836th paper on alcohol with results in people; 2,880 on record in all.
Editor of record: Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Finnish men and women aged 20 and older completed alcohol questionnaires in five population surveys used for an observational follow-up study. Of 103,567 participants, 95,477 entered the analysis after exclusions. The Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test–Consumption combined drinking frequency, usual quantity and heavy-drinking frequency into a score from 0 to 12.
Researchers tracked alcohol-attributable diagnoses and deaths, plus purchases of alcohol-dependence medicines, through 2023, recording 1,444 events. Suggested cutoffs for predicting events over five years were 5 points for women aged 20–64, 3 for those aged 65–79 and 2 for those 80 and older. For men, the corresponding cutoffs were 6, 5 and 3 points. Higher scores were linked to higher risk, with a stronger association in women.
Why it matters
For alcohol-related harm in later life, the authors suggest considering differences within the population aged 65 and older when setting screening cutoffs or alcohol-use guidelines.
Caveats
The outcome excluded primary care visits and diseases only partly attributable to alcohol, such as cancer, so it did not capture all alcohol-related harm. The analysis was exploratory and not preregistered; it excluded people with previous alcohol-attributable register entries.
From the paper
- Participants
Individuals with alcohol‐attributable register entries before baseline were excluded, yielding an analytical sample of 95 477 participants.
- Follow-up
During 879 964 person‐years of follow‐up (mean = 9.2 years), 1444 incident alcohol‐attributable events occurred, including 846 within 5 years from baseline.
- Result
When modelled as a continuous variable and adjusted for age group and sex, each one‐point increase in AUDIT‐C score was associated with a 49% higher hazard of alcohol‐attributable events (HR = 1.49, 95% CI = 1.45–1.53).
Results, Risk of alcohol‐attributable events by AUDIT‐C score
- Limitation
Other individual‐level factors influencing the risk of alcohol‐attributable harm could not be accounted for.
Quoted word for word from the full text on PubMed Central.
The paper
Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare; University of Helsinki
Addiction, May 25, 2026, Open access
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