Penn Alcohol Craving Scale (PACS)

The Penn Alcohol Craving Scale (PACS) is a 5-item questionnaire that measures an individual’s craving to drink alcohol in the past week.

About

The Penn Alcohol Craving Scale (PACS) is a five question instrument, which has been used in several clinical trials at the University of Pennsylvania's Treatment Research Center and was created around 1999. The PACS is a self-report measure that inquires about the frequency, intensity, and duration of craving, the ability to resist drinking, and asks for an overall rating of craving for alcohol over a week.

The PACS proved to have excellent internal consistency, used in multiple outpatient populations globally, and provides initial support for a concise broad-spectrum measure of aggregated alcohol cravings in an Substance Use Disorder (SUD) treatment population. Its design to examine alcohol usage patterns and studies have shown it's ideal for monitoring long-term treatment, but is not sufficient by itself to make a diagnosis by DSM-V for a Substance Use Disorder. The PACS was a strong predictor of subsequent drinking. The PACS score has been studied as a stand-in for the craving criterion with scores greater than 20 were considered to meet diagnostic criteria for craving for a diagnosis of Substance Use Disorder. However there isn't sufficient validated studies to use this cut off score in clinical practice.

References

Flannery BA, Volpicelli JR, Pettinati HM.

Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 1999;23(8):1289-1295.

Flannery BA, Poole SA, Gallop RJ, Volpicelli JR.

J Stud Alcohol. 2003;64(1):120-126.

Costello MJ, Viel C, Li Y, Oshri A, MacKillop J.

J Subst Abuse Treat. 2020;119:108127.

The Penn Alcohol Craving Scale (PACS) calculator is created by QxMD.

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1. How often have you thought about drinking or about how good a drink would make you feel during this period?

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