Identification of smokers, drinkers and risky drinkers by general practitioners

Identification of risky substance users by general practitioners (GPs) is important for providing brief interventions or to refer cases to specialized care, but detection rates of risky users are low, with alcohol users being identified less frequently than smokers.

We compared GPs' assessment and patient self-report concerning tobacco use, number of cigarettes smoked daily, alcohol use, alcohol use disorder, and different risky use definitions of 8476 primary care patients from six European countries. Further, we carried out a logistic regression predicting the GPs perception of the patients' alcohol problems.

GPs identified 88.4% (95% confidence interval (CI): 87.1-89.6%; κ=0.84, 95% CI: 0.83-0.86) of all self-reported smokers but only 64.6% (95% CI: 63.2-65.9%; κ=0.35, 95% CI: 0.33-0.37) of all current drinkers, while they were unable to judge the drinking status of every ninth patient. The GPs' estimation of number of cigarettes smoked daily was slightly lower than the self-report (Δ=0.23 cigarettes/day, p<.001) but both measures were correlated with each other. Of all risky drinkers, defined as having alcohol-related problems or showing risky drinking patterns, 28.7% (95% CI: 25.9-31.4%; κ=0.34, 95% CI: 0.31-0.37) were perceived as having problems with alcohol by the GPs. Patients' self-reported health and social consequences, as well as drinking patterns predicted the GPs' perception of alcohol problems.

GPs were more accurate in identifying smokers than drinkers. Concerning risky drinkers, GPs failed to diagnose a sizeable proportion but were able to detect other drinkers whom common recognition approaches had not recognized.