Adolescent drug abuse becomes a significant public health problem

Teenagers not only drink themselves to death while beeing in an excessive party mood, but also die because of after-affects and their high risk behaviour in the rush. Most of the teenagers totally underestimate the lethal danger of their actions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Bavaria, Germany, the hospitalization rate of adolescents with an alcohol intoxication increased about 15 percent in the present year. Statistical evaluations by the Bavarian Technician health insurance (TK) declare that in the last five years the number of drunken male juveniles being removed to hospital had risen about 62,5 percent while the number of girls even grew about 82,5 percent. The development is “shocking and alarming”, said Helmut Heckenstaller, chief of the Bavarian agency of the TK in Munich.

 

A study by University of Pittsburgh researchers talks the same language. The researchers studied 870 white and African-American adolescents, ages 12 through 18, recruited from both clinical and community settings. The subjects were followed for up to eight years, starting in 1990.

Among the 870 adolescents, researchers noted 21 deaths, or about 2 percent of the group, at an average age of nearly 25 years. Fourteen of those deaths occurred in males with substance abuse disorders (SUDs), or more than 10 percent of that group. Among African-American males with SUDs, 23 percent had died by the age of 25. Males with SUDs in this study group had a mortality rate far in excess of the rate of 137 per 100,000 reported for young adult males in the U.S. general population. Socioeconomic status was not a significant predictor of survival time. Causes of death for the young adults in the study ranged from homicide and suicide to drug overdose and motor vehicle accidents.

"The fact that these were, to an extent, predictable deaths raises additional concerns about the hazards of alcohol and drug problems in teens and young adults," said Duncan B. Clark, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the Pittsburgh Adolescent Alcohol Research Center at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC.

"Adolescents may not be oblivious to the risks their behaviors pose. Previous studies have shown that many teens who engage in alcohol and drug use and other high-risk behavior believed they would die within two years. "Unfortunately, this insight on the part of some teens apparently does not eliminate these problem behaviors," said Dr. Clark. "Effective interventions need to be developed to prevent these predictable deaths in our young adults."