Alcohol Use and Mental Health - Pilot Test of Video-assisted Drinking Topography
Condition: Alcohol Use Disorder
MeSH terms: Alcoholism; Alcohol Drinking
Study type: Interventional
Phase: Phase 4

Summary: 
      The overall goal is to pilot test and establish a procedure for video-assisted alcohol
      topography and explore its utility as an indicator of alcohol use disorder. There are 4
      phases to this study: 1) pre-screening by phone; 2) in-person screening appointment; 3) the
      first alcohol drinking session with videotaping; and 4) follow-up appointment for retest.
    

Detailed description: 
      Alcohol use especially high-risk drinking remains a serious public health concern. Recent
      calls for "precision intervention" require more in-depth understanding of drinking behavioral
      patterns for more individualized treatment. Currently, alcohol research has relied on
      self-reported questionnaire or biomarkers to measure alcohol use. However, self-reports are
      often subjected to social desirability bias or recall errors; whereas biomarkers are prone to
      measurement errors, confounders for false positives, and individual variations in alcohol
      metabolism. There is need for an objective, reliable, and nonintrusive way to measure alcohol
      use with high ecological validity.

      Topography can provide objective measures of consumption behavior patterns in fine grained
      detail. While it has been widely used in tobacco research, alcohol topography has not been
      well-studied. Smoking topography has been shown to provide indicative information for
      nicotine dependence. The investigators hypothesize that alcohol topography can also be used
      as an objective measure indicative of alcohol use disorder. In this project, the
      investigators propose to conduct a video-assisted drinking topographical study. The main
      objectives of this study include: (1) characterize drinking behavioral patterns by converting
      videotaped drinking episodes into various drinking related parameters (e.g., sipping
      frequency, sipping interval, sipping duration, rest duration, sipping amount, and etc.); (2)
      compare drinking behavioral patterns across groups defined by drinking status (social vs.
      heavy drinkers) and mental health status (depressed vs. non-depressed); and (3) use advanced
      nonlinear modeling to quantify the behavioral pattern and to derive potential indicators for
      alcohol use disorder.

      This will be the first study to ever use videotaped topography to analyze alcohol drinking
      behavioral pattern using a quantum model and link it to alcohol use disorder. The study will
      be conducted in the simulated bar laboratory located in Yon Hall at the University of Florida
      (UF). Conducting alcohol topography in such a setting greatly enhances ecological validity,
      further increasing the capacity of this method to capture real life drinking patterns and to
      potentially detect alcohol use disorder.
    

Intervention name(s): Beer; Videotaped drinking session
Intervention type(s): Drug; Device
Intervention description(s): Common brands beer with similar calorie (125-150) and alcohol level (approximately 4.5% ABV); Video-assisted alcohol topography to explore its utility as an indicator of alcohol use disorder
Other intervention name(s): video-assisted topography
Allocation: Non-Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Participant)
Primary purpose: Other