AUD and suggest that a measure of HED would not be out of place as an indicator of AUD severity. However, the correlations were even stronger for two other consumption measures, average daily volume of ethanol intake and largest quantity of drinks consumed in a single day. In fact, after adjusting for age and sex, the proportion of variance explained by AUD severity was considerably greater for largest quantity of drinks (R2=.39) than for either of the other consumption measures (R2=.30 for AVD and .27 for frequency of drinking 5+ drinks). This suggests that some dichotomization of largest drinks, e.g., ever consuming 6+, 8+, 10+ or 12+ drinks, might represent another consumption-based criterion with potential for discriminating along the scale of AUD severity. Notably, overall frequency of drinking was less highly correlated with AUD severity than any of the other three consumption measures examined in this analysis. In contrast, Kahler et al. (2009) found that daily drinking represented the most severe of 13 consumption and alcohol problem items in a longitudinal sample spanning adolescence and young adulthood. This suggests that the meaning of different drinking patterns varies across the life span, and perhaps by gender as well, indicating the need
