The increase in risk classification using Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health: an empirical examination in a sample of community adults in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The 2023 Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction drinking guidelines specify a universal low-risk threshold of 2 or fewer drinks per week, lower than previous guidelines that recommended no more than 10 drinks per week or 2 per occasion for females, and 15 per week or 3 per occasion for males. This study examined the increases in risk classification and perceptions of these new guideline thresholds. METHODS: Prevalence of those exceeding the new low-risk threshold was compared with that of previous and other international guidelines in an observational cohort of community adults (N = 1502) from southern Ontario who had been followed since 2018 (11 waves of data collection). To examine awareness of the new guidelines and perceived risk of drinking beyond them, a follow-up was conducted with a subset of the cohort, three months after the release of the guidelines (April 2023). RESULTS: Across waves, on average, 52% exceeded the new low-risk threshold compared to 11% who exceeded previous guidelines. Other international guidelines classified, on average, 16% (US), 20% (UK) and 29% (WHO) of the sample as exceeding low-risk guidelines. Approximately half of study participants (51%) were aware of Canada's new guidelines, but 77% perceived exceeding 2 drinks per week as having little to no risk. CONCLUSION: Over four times more adults exceeded the new low-risk drinking threshold compared to that of the previous Canadian guidelines. Additionally, more were classified as exceeding the new low-risk threshold compared to other international drinking thresholds. These results, combined with low perceptions of risk associated with consuming more than 2 drinks per week, suggest that many Canadians are at risk of exceeding the new guidelines.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".