Prevention of alcohol and drug misuse in adolescents: An overview of systematic reviews

Background: Substance misuse by adolescents is a chronic and important problem. Prevention programs should be aimed to prevent, reduce or delay the use of substances. Aims: The objectives of this umbrella review was to summarizes the results of systematic reviews conducted in the field of prevention on alcohol and drug misuse in young people because an overview of this information is nonexistent. Methods: We performed a comprehensive search in different electronic databases, contacted the authors to obtain some additional information and checked reference lists of articles. Results: We found 22 systematic reviews on the prevention of alcohol or drugs in which the majority reported on school based programs. Most reviews opted for a narrative description of review findings, due to the heterogeneity of outcome measures in the original research reports. As a consequence, strong evidence on whether or not a particular program was effective could was lacking. Our suggestion for future research would be the development of a set of standardized outcome measures that would allow us to compare and statistically pool the results of original studies.

Publication year:2015

BOF-keylabel:yes

IOF-keylabel:yes

BOF-publication weight:0.1

CSS-citation score:1

Authors from:Higher Education

Accessibility:Open