Further, interim drinking in itself is not clearly defined in the literature (Pitel et al., 2009) such that while some studies consider patients to still be abstainers (Johnson-Greene et al., 1997) having consumed a moderate amount of alcohol, others consider them as having relapsed (Rosenbloom et al., 2004; Rourke and Grant, 1999). Such a binary classification of relapse induces bias in subsequent observations and does not reflect the potential for recovery of relapsers, who have only resumed a limited amount of alcohol consumption without being at a dependent-level.
