Sweet tooth helps diagnose alcoholism

CHAPEL HILL, N.C., May 18, 1998 (UPI) -- An intense sweet tooth combined with personality traits such as novelty seeking may help diagnose alcoholism with great accuracy.

Using a sweet test together with a written personality questionnaire to evaluate the level of novelty seeking, harm avoidance and reward dependence, researchers were able to accurately diagnose alcholism in 85 percent of cases. The questionnaire, called the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire, takes 15-20 minutes, and never mentions the word ``alcohol.''

The combination of tests allowed an accurate diagnosis of alcoholism in 85 percent of the subjects studied, said Dr. Alexey Kampov-Polevoy, who led the study that appears in the journal, ``Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.'' Kampov-Polevoy said, ``No other diagnostic test for alcoholism shows such results.''

Kampov-Polevoy is a research fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies.

A strong sweet tooth alone does not accurate indicate a leaning toward alcoholism. Only test subjects who like sweets and have certain personality types are vulnerable to develop alcoholism, he said.

In the study, 52 men who had never been diagnosed with alcoholism and 26 recovering alcoholics took the sweet preference test and completed the personality questionnaire. Alcoholics who like sweets scored high on harm avoidance and novelty seeking, while nonalcoholics who like sweets scored low on these traits. Neither group differed much on scores for reward dependence.

Kampov-Polevoy said a major part of novelty seeking is impulsiveness. Depressive features and anxiety underlie harm avoidance.

``You might say that the sweet-liking alcoholic is a person who might love to sky dive, but is afraid to go in the airplane,'' he said.

The combination of a desire for strong pleasurable stimuli such as sweets and an impaired control of impulses causes problems for the alcohol.

Kampov-Polevoy said new studies now underway are looking for evidence that the sweet test might be used to tell a genetic risk of alcoholism. The findings, he said, might lead to development of an easier diagnostic test for alcoholism risk and for early intervention to prevent alcoholism through education and behavior change.

Said Dr. Alexey Kampov-Polevoy, ``It is much easier to prevent alcoholism than to treat it.''

(Written by Lori Valigra in Cambridge, Mass.)