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. 2025 May 21;20(1):44.
doi: 10.1186/s13722-025-00569-8.

Preoperative evaluation of alcohol consumption in older patients

Vera Guttenthaler  1 , Maria Wittmann  2 , Jan Menzenbach  2
Affiliations

Preoperative evaluation of alcohol consumption in older patients

Vera Guttenthaler et al. Addict Sci Clin Pract. .

Abstract

Purpose: This sub-analysis of the PROPDESC-study (Pre-Operative Prediction of postoperative delirium by appropriate Screening-study) evaluated the alcohol consumption of older patients with two different assessment tools (single sentence question and Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test-Consumption (AUDIT-C)) and compared the results in regards to detection, reliability, and quantification of patient´s alcohol consumption.

Methods: During their anesthesiological pre-clinic visit 1084 patients older than 59 years were asked whether they consume alcohol daily and 668 of them additionally answered the AUDIT-C questionnaire.

Results: According to the SSQ 11.72% of the patients consumed alcohol daily. In the AUDIT-C sub-group 25.90% reported moderate to high alcohol consumption while infrequent or very low alcohol intake was reported by 41.92%. In the subgroup 31.89% of the patients stated alcohol abstinence. About one quarter (25.13%) of patients who denied daily alcohol intake but scored positive on the AUDIT-C displayed levels of alcohol consumption ranging from moderate (11.20%) to high (13.87%) according to the AUDIT-C.

Conclusion: Reliable information about alcohol consumption is related to the method of questioning. The AUDIT-C evaluates the patient´s alcohol intake precisely and identifies more older patients with possibly health- and surgery-relevant alcohol consumption levels. The validated AUDIT-C provides an objective assessment to the physician during the pre-clinic anesthesiologic consultation. Additionally, handing out a questionnaire to the patient encourages initiative and self-assessment and could also relieve both, the physician and the patient from sensing a moral evaluation of alcohol consumption.

Keywords: AUDIT-C; Alcohol consumption; Anesthesiological evaluation; Preoperative alcohol assessment.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Ethics approval and consent to participate: Ethics vote for the PROPDESC study was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the Medicinal Faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in 2017 (lfd. Nr. 255/17). All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Consent for publication: Not applicable. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Modified after Menzenbach et al. [18]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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