Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT)

Ten questions cover three areas. The first three ask about consumption: how often a person drinks, how much on a typical day and how often six or more drinks are taken on one occasion. The next three ask about signs of dependence: being unable to stop once started, failing to do what was expected because of drinking, and needing a drink in the morning. The last four ask about harm: guilt or remorse after drinking, being unable to remember the night before, injury to oneself or others, and concern expressed by relatives, friends or health workers.

Saunders and colleagues (1993) developed the test in a World Health Organization (WHO) collaborative project across six countries, to identify hazardous and harmful drinking early, before dependence develops. Guidance for its use in primary care was published by Babor and colleagues (2001).

The ten ratings are summed into a total. Lower totals indicate low-risk drinking; higher totals indicate drinking that is increasingly hazardous, harmful or suggestive of dependence. The report places the total within the published risk zones and describes what each zone tends to mean. The test is a screen, not a diagnosis, and its value lies largely in opening a conversation about drinking.

The test is used in primary care, emergency and mental health settings to identify people who may benefit from brief advice or further assessment, and widely in research. On this site, the CAGE questionnaire is a shorter alcohol screen, the Cannabis Use Disorder Identification Test, Revised (CUDIT-R) follows a similar approach for cannabis, and the Drug Abuse Screening Test (DAST-10) covers other drugs.

The Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test was built to find hazardous and harmful drinking before dependence develops, and its scores converge with interview diagnoses of alcohol use disorders and with measures of drinking quantity and frequency (Saunders et al., 1993). A later review found that it predicts alcohol-related problems across primary care, emergency, college and workplace settings (Reinert & Allen, 2007).

The questionnaire is related to, but distinct from, brief dependence screens that ask only about lifetime consequences, because its consumption items capture risky drinking that has not yet caused harm (Reinert & Allen, 2007). It is specific to alcohol, so it shows discriminant separation from screens for other drug use (Saunders et al., 1993).

At the published cutoff the AUDIT shows sensitivity of roughly 0.85-0.95 and specificity of 0.78-0.90 for hazardous and harmful drinking (Saunders et al., 1993; Reinert & Allen, 2007).

“How often do you have a drink containing alcohol?”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed to a total score and compared against published screening cutoffs.

The report explains which published screening bands your score falls in and what they mean.