Monitoring the course of alcohol dependence

Long-term monitoring of an individual patient with alcohol dependence has usually been managed by self-report, i.e., a patient is expected to honestly apprise their physician with details of their alcohol use and recovery.^[2] However, due to understandable problems of memory and recall, and perhaps not complete patient honesty, self-report data is imperfect.^[2] This observation had led to the use of biomarker data, and the development of digital biomarkers, to monitor alcohol-use disorder.^[1,2]

References:
[1] Zetterström A, Hämäläinen MD, Winkvist M, et al. The clinical course of alcohol use disorder depicted by digital biomarkers. Front Digit Health 2021; 3: 732049.

[2] Hämäläinen MD, Zetterström A, Winkvist M, et al. Real-time monitoring using a breathalyzer-based eHealth system can identify lapse/relapse patterns in alcohol use disorder patients. Alcohol Alcohol 2018; 53 (4): 368–375.