Social Inequality and Substance Use and Problematic Gambling among Adolescents and Young Adults: A Review of Epidemiological Surveys in Germany.

Social Inequality and Substance Use and Problematic Gambling among Adolescents and Young Adults: A Review of Epidemiological Surveys in Germany. Curr Drug Abuse Rev. 2015 Dec 8; Authors: Henkel D, Zemlin U Abstract The current review provides an overview of socioepidemiological research in Germany about the prevalence of addictive behaviours (smoking, binge and hazardous drinking, consumption of cannabis and other illegal drugs, the non-medical use of prescription drugs and problematic gambling) among adolescents (11-17 years) and young adults (18-25 years), also differentiating between different socioeconomic status (SES) indicators (attended school type, family affluence, parental occupational status, parental SES, employment status) and migration background. The authors evaluated data from ten national surveys and one regional survey conducted between 2002 and 2012, which included different samples. The trends over this time frame reveal that the proportion of adolescents who smoke tobacco, show problematic patterns of alcohol consumption, use cannabis or other illegal drugs has generally declined over the investigated time span in Germany. The results nevertheless suggest that some strong associations still exist between social inequalities and the prevalence of substance use. The detailed results are summarised in twelve tables. The main results are as follows: 1) Low SES (school type, em¬ploy-ment status) was consistently asso...
Source: Current Drug Abuse Reviews - Category: Addiction Tags: Curr Drug Abuse Rev Source Type: research