Cognitive Lifetime Drinking History (CLDH)
Principal Investigator: Marcia Russell, Ph.D.

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Lifetime drinking patterns are important to the etiology of chronic diseases and alcohol disorders, and there is a need for standardized methods of assessing and analyzing alcohol consumption over the lifetime.

To address this need, I led the development of the Cognitive Lifetime Drinking History, a computer-assisted interview that is used to assess drinking patterns over an individual's lifetime.

A test-retest study indicated that estimates of lifetime alcohol intake and frequency of intoxication based on CLDH assessments made at least a week apart were highly correlated, with coefficients ranging between 0.73 and 0.83 (Russell et al., 1997).

The CLDH was then used to assess alcohol consumption in case-control studies of coronary heart disease and lung cancer. We recently conducted preliminary cluster analyses of CLDH data covering the period from ages 5 to 50 in over 4,000 subjects from these studies.

By age 50 drinking trajectories had converged into two groups, one that drank little or nothing, and another that averaged about one drink a day. There were substantive differences in drinking trajectories prior to this convergence, and it will be highly informative to investigate the factors that determine these differences and the health consequences associated with them.

Such information is needed to guide the development of policies that would encourage people to choose lifetime drinking trajectories compatible with good health.


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