At Risk Youth

In December 2009, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) issued its most recent “Monitoring the Future” report on substance abuse among young people. Amid some disappointing results, some good news did emerge:

• Cigarette smoking is at its lowest point in the history of the survey on all measures among students in grades 8, 10, and 12.
• Between 2004 and 2009, a drop in past-year use of methamphetamine was reported for all grades, and lifetime use dropped significantly among 8th-graders.
• Among 10th- and 12th-graders, 5-year declines were reported for past-year use of amphetamines and cocaine.
• From 2004 to 2009, decreases were observed in lifetime, past-year, past-month, and binge use of alcohol across the three grades surveyed.
• Attitudes toward substance abuse, often seen as harbingers of change in use, showed many favorable changes.

The findings listed above were posted on the NIDA website, www.drugabuse.gov.

About 3,500 teenagers ages 15 to 19 years old (approximately nine every week) die in automobile accidents every year, according to new statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Car crashes remain the number one cause of death for teenagers. Boys die in car crashes at twice the rate of girls, but some experts think that may be changing because new studies show that girls are becoming more aggressive.

Most states are requiring tougher standards for driver’s licenses, such as more time in behind the wheel training, limiting the number of passengers in a teenagers’ cars, and not allowing teenagers to drive at night.

Even six-year-olds can develop school-related stress, according to a new study of Chinese children.

• Prof. Therese Hesketh of University College London studied 2191 children ages 6 to 12 years old.
• One-third of the students had stress-related symptoms, such as headaches and stomach aches.
• 80 percent worried about school exams, 66 percent were afraid their teachers would punish them.
• 75 percent feared their parents would punish them physically.

Many Chinese parents and teachers pressure children to compete for limited placements in universities, government jobs and graduate careers.

This study appeared in the British Medical Association’s Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Childhood trauma may cause some adults gain weight and have difficulty losing it, according to a new study of more than 17,000 patients in the Kaiser Permanente health system.

In 1987 Dr. Vincent Felitti studied 286 obese people in the Kaiser system and found that 50% had been sexually abused as children, a much higher rate than average. He decided to look into other kinds of childhood trauma that may be linked to overweight, and began to investigate previous studies.

• One study of more than 11,000 women found that those who had been abused as children were 27 percent more likely to be overweight.
• A study of 15,000 teenagers found that sexual childhood abuse in males raised their risk of obesity as adults to 66 percent.
• Dr. Felitti then began the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) study involving a database of over 17,000 Kaiser patients.

Dr. Felitti and his colleagues defined adverse experience as ongoing childhood neglect, living with one or no biological parent, having a mentally ill or drug addicted parent, having a parent in jail, witnessing domestic violence, and sexual, physical or emotional abuse. Children who had four or more of these experiences had double the risk of obesity, double the risk of heart attack and stroke, and four times the risk for emphysema.

Dr. Felitti and others believe that food is a comforting escape for abused children.

“Being fat is not the problem,” he said. “It’s the solution.”

What’s more troubling about the study is that some researchers believe that adverse experiences in childhood can lead to permanent biological changes in certain areas of the body, and that such changes are passed down from one generation to the next.

A family intervention program that was developed at Iowa State University Extension will be undergoing an extensive evaluation by a team of researchers from Penn State, San Francisco School of Medicine and the University of California.

A Jan. 5 press release provided the following details about the effort to review what one researcher described as “one of the most promising universal family-based preventative interventions.”

The study, funded by a $3.3-million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and carried out by Penn State researchers, will test changes to an intervention program called “Strengthening Families Program: For Parents and Youth 10-14″ (SFP 10-14) which educates parents and children on ways to enhance their relationships.

Researchers led by Dr. Douglas Coatsworth, associate professor of human development and family studies, are adapting SFP 10-14, which was established to prevent the onset of teen drug use and shows good results. Coatsworth believes the program can be strengthened and could also prevent other poor outcomes in teens, such as risky sexual behavior.

“The Strengthening Families Program is one of the most promising universal family-based preventive interventions,” said Coatsworth. “Research shows that it delays the onset of substance use, improves parenting practices, increases youths’ resistance to peer pressure and reduces aggressive or destructive behavior,” says Coatsworth. “However, most of those studies have been done by the same research group, and independent replication will strengthen the evidence for the program’s efficacy.”

Coatsworth has called the program “one of the most promising universal family-based preventative interventions.” He has seen improvement in parenting skills, delayed onset of teen drug abuse, and overall reductions of aggressive and dangerous behavior.