Age group differences in response to treatment for problematic alcohol use.

That structural characteristics act as markers of modified treatment outcome is a long standing idea in the alcohol treatment field. In order to test whether patient age is a factor to be considered in making treatment assignments, we examined data collected under a clinical trial. Two hundred and twenty-nine patients were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: extended cognitive behavioral treatment (CB), relationship enhancement (RE), or relationship and vocational enhancement (VE). This paper reports on outcome (alcohol use) 3-6 months after treatment assignment. Our question was, would different age groups assigned to the treatment conditions exhibit different outcomes? There were no significant main effects by either treatment condition or age group. There was a significant treatment condition by age group interaction. With increasing age, the differences in treatment seemed to increase. For the younger aged group (18-29 years old) no statistically significant treatment differences were detected. Middle aged patients (30-49 years old) did best in the RE condition. Older aged patients (50 + years old) did best when assigned to the CB condition. These findings lead us to conclude that patient age is a variable which should be considered when testing patient-treatment matching hypotheses.