Hepatitis B validity of drug users' self-report.

Although drug users' self-report has provided data for much of the published literature about drug use, little is known about self-report validity when participants are asked about diseases that are associated with drug abuse, such as hepatitis. Injecting drug users and crack cocaine smokers (N?=?669) were recruited in Anchorage, Alaska, and asked whether they had been diagnosed previously with hepatitis B. These self-report data were compared to various hepatitis B and C seromarkers as measures of validity of self-report expressed as sensitivity and specificity. Results indicate that although test-retest reliability for self-report is high (.905) and specificity is high (96.06% for hepatitis C virus, or HCV), sensitivity is low (23.74% for HCV). Thus, because of its low sensitivity, self-report of hepatitis should be used only as a prevalence estimate lower bound. More than half of the drug users who had contracted hepatitis had never been told that they were infected. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)