Telescoping and Gender Differences in Alcohol Dependence: New Evidence From Two National Surveys
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The course of alcohol disorders in women is often described as "telescoped" compared to that in men, with a later age at initiation of alcohol use but shorter times from use to dependence and treatment. This study examined evidence for such a telescoping effect in the general population and tested birth cohort effects for gender differences. METHOD: Data from two U.S. national surveys conducted 10 years apart (1991-1992 and 2001-2002) using the same diagnostic instrument (the Alcohol Use Disorder and Associated Disabilities Interview Schedule-IV) were used to analyze five birth cohorts. Age at initiation of alcohol use, time from first use to dependence, and time from dependence to first treatment were analyzed. Interaction terms (cohort by gender; cohort by gender by time) were tested in Cox proportional hazards models. RESULTS: Little evidence was found for a telescoping effect in women. For alcohol use and dependence, cohort and gender interacted, which suggests that gender differences are diminished in more recent cohorts. A three-way interaction of cohort, gender, and time was significant for time from first use to dependence, suggesting that men have a shorter time to dependence, especially in younger cohorts. CONCLUSIONS: A telescoping effect is not evident in the general population. Gender differences in the overall hazard of alcohol use and dependence are decreasing in more recent cohorts, while gender differences in time from first use to dependence are increasing. These findings challenge the commonly held notion of a gender-specific course of alcohol disorders and suggest the need for a greater clinical focus on problem drinking in women and further research on accelerated time to dependence in men.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".