The view that alcoholism--or in modern terminology, alcohol use disorder (AUD)-- is actually a heterogeneous group of disorders has had a long history, but a systematic description of number of types, differentiating characteristics, and developmental course has occurred only within the past quarter century. That work, primarily based on retrospective clinical and epidemiologic survey data, suggested that clinical manifestations, etiology, and prognosis differentiated at least two different “types,” one with externalizing comorbid traits and sometimes referred to as “antisocial alcoholism,” the other without these traits (Babor et al., 1992; Cloninger, Sigvardsson, & Bohman, 1988; Zucker, 1987). Longitudinal studies in more recent years have been able to prospectively confirm the importance of externalizing characteristics as strong etiologic predictors of the first type (see Zucker, 2006, 2008, for reviews of the older studies as well as of more recent ones).
