The aims of this Developmental Grant Proposal for Collaborative International Projects are to: compare the sensitivity, specificity and efficiency of standard screening instruments and items for identifying harmful drinking and alcohol dependence among injured and non-injured Hispanic emergency room patients in California and in Mexico: 2) examine new measures which may be more efficient in identifying alcohol problems in Hispanic emergency room populations in California and Mexico: 3) compare the sensitivity, specificity and efficiency of screening instruments and items in the California and Mexico ER samples with their respective general populations. This project builds on and extends work currently funded by NIAAA to test standard screening instruments for harmful drinking/abuse and alcohol dependence in a largely Hispanic (specifically, Mexican American) emergency room (ER) population at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose (Santa Clara County), California. The project also builds on and extends work currently being carried out by the Mexican Institute of Psychiatry in three emergency rooms in Pachuca, Hidalgo, as part of a larger project of alcohol abuse, consequences, prevention and treatment, funded by the Mexican National Council of Technology and Science and the Ministry of Health. The Pachuca study is using the same methodology and a similar questionnaire with identical questions, among others, regarding screening and diagnostic instruments for harmful drinking/abuse and alcohol dependence, as that used in the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center ER study. He proposed Developmental grant seeks to build on and enhance prior collaborative work on emergency room studies between the Alcohol Research Group and the Mexican Institute of Psychiatry, and extend these projects in the U.S. and Mexico by requesting funding for comparative analyses only, related to the performance of standard screening instruments foe harmful drinking and alcohol dependence. Comparisons of the performance of these instruments and the development of new, shorter and sensitive instruments among Hispanics in the U.S., especially Mexican Americans, and those in Mexico who share a common origin, is particularly important given this is the most rapidly growing ethnic minority in the U.S. and the growing population of Hispanics in California, many of whom have recently arrived in the U.S. and do not speak English.
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