The contributions of problem drinking to the level of psychiatric morbidity in the general hospital.

Of 331 patients admitted to a general hospital to whom the CAGE questionnaire was administered, those who scored 2 or more for alcoholism scored higher on a number of measures of psychiatric morbidity than those with a CAGE score of 0. Those patients who scored 1 showed less psychiatric morbidity than those who scored 0. Among the male patients who scored at least one question positively, those who had abstained from alcohol for at least a year showed higher levels of psychiatric morbidity than those still drinking.