using for alcohol and sedatives; giving up activities for sedatives). These results demonstrate the feasibility of applying IRT and ROC-AUC procedures to select dependence symptom items to develop an efficient, reasonably sensitive, and simplified tool to screen for SUDs in medical settings. Findings also add to the evidence for single-item screeners for “alcohol or drug use” that have shown good sensitivity and specificity in primary care settings (Smith et al., 2009; Smith et al., 2010). Therefore, expanding prior research on the two-item screener for SUDs (Brown et al., 2001), these combined results from IRT and ROC-AUC analyses suggest the value of using taking large amounts and inability to cut down as part of a simplified screener to facilitate detection of problematic substance users with a high probability for having a SUD (National Institutes of Health, 2011).
