a mild-severity criterion, with intermediate-level discrimination compared to the other criteria. We further examined whether addition of craving as a criterion while holding the diagnostic threshold constant would add new cases, thus potentially casting a wider “diagnostic net”. For users of alcohol, cannabis, cocaine and heroin, this resulted in 5, 5, 7 and 2 additional cases, respectively, a trivial increase. Thus, results provide only mixed support, at best, for the addition of craving. Non-empirical reasons for adding craving to the DSM-5 SUD criteria are that ICD-10 criteria include craving, and thus its additionwould improve consistency between the two sets of diagnostic criteria (World Health Organization, 1993). Also, some consider craving to be a central feature of SUD and relapse (Goldstein and Volkow, 2002; O’Brien, 2005), although craving has not predicted relapse in all studies (Ahmadi et al., 2009; Garbutt et al., 2009). If craving is added to the DSM-5 SUD criteria, additional studies should examine it for redundancy, research that would in fact be valuable for all the diagnostic criteria.
