The Prevalence of Benzodiazepine Dependence among Community-Dwelling Older Adult Users in Quebec According to Typical and Atypical Criteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Use of benzodiazepines, common among older people, may lead to substance dependence. DSM-IV-TR criteria for this iatrogenic problem may apply poorly to older persons following a physician-prescribed regimen. This study, first of its kind, aimed to determine the prevalence rate of benzodiazepine dependence in older persons according to DSM-IV-TR and other atypical criteria. METHODS: Descriptive study based on face-to-face interviews conducted in the homes of 2,785 persons aged 65 years or older who were randomly selected from across the province of Quebec, Canada. RESULTS: Use of benzodiazepines was reported by 25.4% of respondents. Among them, 9.5% met DSM-IV-TR criteria for substance dependence. However, 43% of users reported being dependent, and one third agreed that it would be a good thing to stop taking benzodiazepines. INTERPRETATION: Benzodiazepine substance dependence is established at one tenth of community-dwelling older persons taking these medications, although a much larger proportion self-labels as dependent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".