Recently, Mewton et al (19) reported that transitioning from DSM-IV (6.0%) to DSM-5 (9.7%) had contributed to a 61.7% increase in the prevalence of AUDs. In contrast, our results found a more modest increase of 11%. As our prevalence of DSM-5 AUDs (10.8%; 10.2% un-weighted) is highly comparable to theirs, we speculated that differences in DSM-IV diagnoses of abuse or dependence contributed to this difference. While our prevalence of DSM-IV dependence (4.4%, or 5% of lifetime users) is highly comparable to theirs (4.1%), our rate of hierarchically defined abuse was much higher (5.3% vs. 1.9%). While failure to fulfill role obligations (2.1% vs 1.4%), legal problems (1.1% vs 0.9%) and interpersonal conflict (1.2% vs 3.1%) were comparable across the NSMHWB and similar individuals (N=17,535, see Table S2) in NESARC, the prevalence of hazardous use was considerably higher (13.9%) in NESARC when compared to NSMHWB (2.1%).
