Heading Off Alcohol Use Disorder!
Take action when the consequences of alcohol use disorder are easiest to reverse.
By Mark S Gold
Published by Psychology Today on August 1, 2024
Key points
• Waiting for drinkers to hit bottom is risky and means it likely that problem drinking becomes alcoholism.
• New insights and research support brief and early interventions and treatment to reduce harm.
• Pre-addiction, like prediabetes, often precedes raging disease, thus treatment should begin at this point.
• Future addiction evaluations with genes and comorbidity analyses may allow individualized and best treatments.
Many people don’t realize they have an alcohol problem. Yet early indicators of alcohol issues show that if attention were paid, excessive drinking might be headed off before alcoholism develops. For example, experts now recognize a pre-addiction stage of alcohol use disorder (AUD). If a person is identified with pre-addiction before alcohol issues become entrenched and then receives treatment, major emotional and physical pain could be averted. This post covers the range of problematic alcohol use from pre-addiction to AUD. It also describes existing and potential treatments.
