School-Based Interventions for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Among United States Adolescents - a Systematic Review

 3035401992 Xiaochen LI

 School-based interventions for alcohol and drug abuse among United States adolescents - a systematic review

Introduction

Alcohol or Drug abuse is commonly understood in terms of incidents when the level of alcohol or drug consumption lead to physical, psychological, or social issues. According to World Health Organization (“WHO”), alcohol abuse causes 3.3 million net deaths (5.9% of total) and 139 million net Disability-Adjusted Life Years (“DALYs”) (5.1% of total) annually worldwide. What is more, there are also strong evidences from cross-sectional epidemiological studies and prospective longitudinal studies showing significant association between adolescents’ use of drug or alcohol and problems caused by substance abuse later on in life. Further, adolescents’ use of alcohol or drug can also link to other health risks related to cancer, cardiovascular disease, as well as social problems including mental illness, self-harm, suicide and even drop in life expectancy.

Given the burden and potential impact of drug and alcohol abuse among adolescents, and the fact that adolescents spend most of their time outside home in school, a systematic review was conducted focusing on the school-based interventions for alcohol and drug abuse among United States adolescents. The goal of this review is to summarize and enumerate recommendations for improving existing school-based alcohol and drug abuse prevention programs for adolescents.

Method

Search strategy

Aim to identify interventions for adolescent drug and alcohol abuse in school-setting in the United States, literature published up to December 2017 were systematically reviewed based on search from PubMed, Medline, EMBASE and ERIC. Terms that were searched including:

 Substance (alcohol and drug) abuse,

 school-based,

 adolescents,3035401992 Xiaochen LI

Confidential 2

 resistance strategies,

 prevention,

 protective factors,

In particular, synonyms for each term using both free-text words and MESH were combined using the “OR” and “AND”. Moreover, regards to for relevant additional literatures, the same search were then conducted using Google Scholar and Google.

Literature selection criteria

The articles identified were then screened following the below selection criteria:

1. Targeting adolescents are aged between 11 and 22 years-old

2. Focusing on protective factors, prevention, resistance or harm reduction strategies of drug or alcohol abuse

3. Focusing on school based prevention programs

4. Focusing on literatures written in either English or Chinese

Results

Following the above search strategy and selection criteria, approximately 2,200 relevant literatures were identified, with 200 more identified via additional sources. Of the 2,400 literatures identified, 101 literatures were examined upon removing the duplicate ones. Out of 101 literatures, 8 were selected based on the selection criteria: