Background: Daily smoking adolescents are a public health problem as they are more likely to become adult smokers and to develop smoking-related health problems later on in their lives.
For boys, some of the currently recommended tobacco control policies may help to reduce smoking prevalence. However, the model is less suitable for girls, indicating gender differences in the potential efficacy of smoking policies. Future research should address this issue.
Gradients in risk for youth injury increased in association with numbers of risk behaviors reported in every country examined. This cross-cultural finding indicates that the issue of multiple risk behavior, as assessed via an additive score, merits attention as an etiological construct. This concept may be useful in future injury control research and prevention efforts conducted among populations of young people.
As PCE increases, cannabis use may be expected to increase and gender differences decrease. Cross-national comparable policy measures should be developed and evaluated to examine which harm reduction strategies are most effective.
ABSTRACT.Objective: International studies show a rise in drunkenness among young people in recent years. In this study the number of drunkenness occasions among 15-vear old students in 22 countries is reported. The cross-national association between drunkenness, on the one hand, and the frequency of alcohol intake and the preference for distilled spirits, on the other, is described. Variation between countries is examined on the basis of national characteristics, including national prevention policies. Method: Data on alcohol use were taken from the 1998 World Health Organization (WHO) collaborative, cross-national survey on Health Behaviour of School-Aged Children. The multinational representative sample consisted of 10,951 male and 11,451 female (drinling) students. Country characteristics were derived from the WHO Global Alcohol Database. Hierarchical Generalized Linear Model was used to analyze the effects of country characteristics on individual drunkenness. Results: The lifetime prevalence of drunkenness was 57. 1% for males and 50.4% for females. The number of drunkenness occasions showed a significant variation in the 22 countries. The correlation between drunkenness and preference for distilled spirits was positive in 21 countries and strong (Spearman's p > 0.40) in some eastern countries. Geographic location turned out to be an important country-level association with drunkenness and its predictors. Southern European countries showed moderate associations, whereas strong associations were found in Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and Russia. Conclusions: Cultural differences in alcohol use exist, and frequency of alcohol intake and use of spirits influence drunkenness. Despite the potential influence of preventive policy measures on drunkenness, no preventive effect of the measures included in this study was found. (J Stud Alcohol 64: 650-661, 2003) THE THREE MOST FREQUENT forms of mortality among adolescents, accidental death, homicide and suicide, are associated with alcohol use (Edwards et al
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