At significant but more modest levels, stress- and cue-induced alcohol craving were also found to be predictive of time to alcohol relapse but not relapse to heavy drinking. These findings are consistent with previous research showing stress- and negative affect-related alcohol craving to be predictive of alcohol relapse.3 As shown in Figure 5, individuals with stress- and cue-induced craving levels higher than 6 of 10 had only a 16% chance of surviving relapse at day 30 compared with those with the mean area under the curve level of 1 of 10, showing about a 50% chance of surviving relapse at day 30. These results support previous research on the clinical importance of individual differences in craving responses39 and indicate that such variation is relevant to alcohol relapse risk and treatment outcome.
