An Empirical Study of Cut-Off Points for the Persian Version of Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test

Background: audit is constructed to be able to identify hazardous drinking and less severe alcohol-related problems. the originalaudit was shown to have a cut-off score of 8 and above for identifying hazardous or harmful alcohol consumption. the aim of thisstudy was to establish the optimal cut-off point of the persian version of alcohol use disorders identification test (audit) inpsychiatric out-patients.methods: participants were a sample of consecutive patients at imam hossein hospital (tehran/iran). they consisted of 99 patients,49 of them diagnosed with alcohol dependency and 50 patients randomly selected from a sample of patients using alcohol but withother primary diagnoses. all statistics including means and standard deviations as well as medians and interquartile range werecalculated in spss 24 software environment.results: a receiver operating curve analysis showed that by using a 20-point cut-off, the audit had an optimal combination ofsensitivity (.92) and specificity (.74). the rate of discrimination was .88.conclusions: given the high sensitivity and acceptable specificity of the audit, the test can be used as an effective instrument foridentification of alcohol use disorders in the persian psychiatric out-patient population. furthermore, the receiver operating curvefound in this study resembles the one found in previous studies despite the differences in alcohol cultures between iran and countrieswith higher alcohol consumption.