THE USE OF IMPLICIT ASSOCIATIONS TEST FOR DIAGNOSING ALCOHOL DEPENDENCE

Abstract

Alcohol dependence syndrome is a severe disease that affects not only the health but also the social functioning of a person and leads to dangerous consequences. Early diagnosis of this disease will help to minimize the damage. Objectives. To develop a method for diagnosing alcohol dependence syndrome by means of implicit associations test. Material and methods. The indices of passing the implicit associations test by 152 patients with the diagnosis «Alcohol dependence syndrome», who made up the control group, and those of 189 practically healthy volunteers were investigated. The statistical analysis was made in R 4.0.3 format. To build the model, multiple logistic regression was used, the quality of which was assessed using ROC analysis. The differences were considered statistically significant at p-value <0.05. Results. These values were used to build a logistic regression model. The resulting model has a high predictive power - sensitivity and specificity made up 90.32% and 67.74%, respectively, AUC (area under the curve) and Fmes (general characteristics of predictive power) were 88.06% and 83.17%, correspondingly. Conclusions. As a result of the work carried out, a highly sensitive method for diagnosing alcohol dependence syndrome using an implicit associations test has been developed, which can be used for screening and diagnosing, as well as for dynamic observation of patients with alcohol dependence syndrome.