Teens aged 12 to 17 who use alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, or illegal drugs are more likely to come up with lifelong chemical abuse disease than those who begin at a later age, recent research reports.
The researchers pulled information for people age 12 to 25 in the 2015 to 2018 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The researchers looked at initiation dates, use in the previous 12 months, life usage, and recognized substance use disorders.
Lifetime substance use among teens in 2018 has been, normally, 26.3percent for alcohol, 15.4percent for cannabis, and 13.4percent for tobacco. For all those age 18 and above, the incidence was 79.7percent for alcohol, 51.5percent for cannabis, and 55.0percent for tobacco.
The prevalence of cannabis use disease was greater among teenagers (age 12-17) than young adults over 12 weeks of the first usage. Considering the life use of illegal drugs in young adults, incidence within 12 weeks of use was 30.9percent for heroin use disease and 24.8percent for methamphetamine use disease.
A limitation of the study was that the NSDUH data excludes incarcerated and unhoused people, which means incidence could be underestimated.
“But” the investigators concluded, “our outcomes identified adolescents as exceptionally vulnerable to SUDs, encouraging the demand for research to assess the effectiveness of screening for chemical use and SUDs in primary care settings as well as the timely treatment .”
