...treatment providers alike to better understand the course of disease and to improve its treatment. The National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) is an example of a large, random, representative survey of people living in the United States. This survey addressed all aspects of alcohol use--from determining when a respondent took his or her first drink to discovering whether he or she has experienced co-occurring mental health problems. NESARC's data have several practical applications: to help us to better define the intricate relationship between alcohol use and comorbidity, understand high-risk drinking patterns, design better-targeted treatment approaches, and monitor recovery from alcohol use disorders. Analyses with NESARC data have only just begun. As more researchers take advantage of the richness of this data set, more knowledge will be gained, helping to advance treatment interventions in the alcohol field. KEY WORDS: National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC); survey; general population survey; statistical data; epidemiology; United States; alcohol abuse; alcohol dependence; alcohol use disorders; drinking patterns; comorbidity; treatment; recovery

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Epidemiology is one of the central disciplines of public health. Its aim is to provide information on the distribution of disease and the risk factors for it within populations. For treatment providers, epidemiological data provide increased understanding of the natural history of disease and help improve treatment; for public health professionals, these studies help identify populations or population subgroups at greatest risk for a particular disease or diseases. Using the results of epidemiological studies, health care professionals can tailor prevention efforts to the risk factors for the diseases of interest and direct these efforts toward the population groups at highest risk of suffering from them.

The National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), upon which the articles in this issue of Alcohol Research & Health are based, is a general population survey, that is, a study in which the subjects are a random, representative sample of a larger population. The main advantage of general population surveys is that as long as the subjects in the study are selected at random, the findings from the study are generalizable to the larger population, independent of the study sample size. Sample size matters, however, because the larger the sample size, the more accurate (i.e., precisely representative) the findings will be. NESARC successfully fulfills these two conditions: random selection of subjects and...

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