Assessing NIAAA’s Definition of Recovery from Alcohol Use Disorder: A Latent Class Analysis of a Heterogeneous Online Sample

NIAAA’s 2022 definition of recovery from alcohol use disorder (AUD) includes two core components, remission of DSM-5 AUD criteria and cessation of heavy drinking. This study’s purpose was to assess patterns of AUD symptoms and heavy drinking in a heterogeneous national sample, in order to clarify the utility of the definition. Participants who self-reported having resolved an alcohol problem for at least 6 months were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 386) and surveyed about their problem severity, current drinking, and AUD symptomology. We used latent class analysis to discern meaningful clusters of AUD symptoms and heavy drinking, as well as factors associated with class membership. A two-class model was the best fit for the data. The first class, which we termed Less Symptomatic, included 83.4% of the sample. Individuals in this class were unlikely to endorse any of the 10 AUD criteria (<2.5% of the time) and 24.3% reported heavy drinking. In the second class (16.6% of the sample), termed Symptomatic, 45% of respondents endorsed at least one AUD criterion and 88.2% reported heavy drinking. These findings suggest that some individuals in recovery may continue to drink heavily with minimal problems, while others continue to experience AUD symptoms.