{"doi":"10.1111/acer.14428","title":"Differences in Sociodemographic and Alcohol‐Related Clinical Characteristics Between Treatment Seekers and Nontreatment Seekers and Their Role in Predicting Outcomes in the COMBINE Study for Alcohol Use Disorder","abstract":"BACKGROUND: One of the challenges in early-stage clinical research aimed at developing novel treatments for alcohol use disorder (AUD) is that the enrolled participants are heavy drinkers, but do not seek treatment for AUD. AIMS: To compare nontreatment seekers with alcohol dependence (AD) from 4 human laboratory studies conducted at Brown University (N = 240; 65.4% male) to treatment seekers with AD from the multisite COMBINE study (N = 1,383; 69.1% male) across sociodemographic and alcohol-related clinical variables and to evaluate whether the variables that significantly differentiate the 2 samples predict the 3 main COMBINE clinical outcomes: time to relapse, percent days abstinent (PDA), and good clinical outcome. METHODS: Sample characteristics were assessed by parametric and nonparametric testing. Three regression models measured the association between the differing variables and the 3 main COMBINE clinical outcomes. RESULTS: The nontreatment seekers, compared to the treatment seekers, were more ethnically diverse, less educated, single, and working part-time or unemployed (p's < 0.05); they met fewer DSM-IV AD criteria and had significantly lower scores on alcohol-related scales (p's < 0.05); they were less likely to have a father with alcohol problems (p < 0.0001) and had a significantly earlier age of onset and longer duration of AD (p's < 0.05); they also had significantly more total drinks, drinks per drinking day, heavy drinking days (HDD), and lower PDA in the 30 days prior to baseline (p's < 0.0001 to <0.05). Having more HDD in the 30 days prior to baseline predicted all of the 3 COMBINE clinical outcomes. All the other characteristics mentioned above that differed significantly between the 2 groups predicted at least 1 of the 3 COMBINE clinical outcomes, except for level of education, age of onset, and duration of AD. CONCLUSIONS: The observed differences between groups should be considered in efforts across participant recruitment at different stages of the development of new treatments for AUD.","journal":"Alcoholism Clinical and Experimental Research","year":2020,"id":100219,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":29,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9484,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":492277,"name":"Daria Piacentino","orcid":"0000-0002-9991-7403","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":272599,"name":"Xiaobai Li","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":439160,"name":"Victoria M. Long","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":264239,"name":"Mary R. Lee","orcid":"0000-0002-2235-0816","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":161326,"name":"Robert M. Swift","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":493152,"name":"George A. Kenna","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":239673,"name":"Lorenzo Leggio","orcid":"0000-0001-7284-8754","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":454471,"name":"Carolina L. Haass‐Koffler","orcid":"0000-0002-5634-5679","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":43,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T22:38:35.493878Z","pmid":"32997422","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}