Many DSM-IV and −5 personality disorders (PDs) reflect problems of emotion regulation and/or impulse control, which may make individuals with PD diagnoses particularly vulnerable to over-use alcohol, and consequently, to develop an alcohol use disorder (AUD). Indeed, all the ten PDs are associated with alcohol dependency, and 42% of all PD patients meet the criteria for lifetime alcohol dependency [1]. However, the co-occurrence of PDs themselves is high, implying that all the PDs might not have an independent association with AUD [2]. In epidemiologic surveys, a PD might just indicate an increased likelihood of having another PD which could be ‘causally’ linked with AUD. Furthermore, many researchers argue that PDs should be conceptualized differently than in the DSM-IV [3–6]. Therefore, it is possible that any PDs associated with AUD merely reflect an increased likelihood of having specific symptoms or behaviors associated with AUD. To date, it has not been clarified which of the 80 criteria used to diagnose the 10 categorical PDs are the most robust correlates of AUD. Two factors complicate the analysis of PD traits in relation to AUD: “curse of dimensionality” and statistical confounding. In this study, we simultaneously address both these problems.
