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March 19, 2008Curbing Teen Drinking Difficult in Urban Areas |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: A three-year, three-pronged prevention program did little to keep Chicago middle schoolers from drinking or using drugs, despite its prior success in rural Minnesota, where the program reduced alcohol use 20 to 30 percent, UF and University of Minnesota researchers recently reported in the online edition of the journal Addiction. "The intervention found to be effective in rural areas was not effective here, which really surprised us," said Kelli A. Komro, a UF associate professor of epidemiology in the UF College of Medicine and the study's lead author. Even worse, exposure to alcohol at a young age may damage the developing brain, according to a 2007 U.S. Surgeon General report. "Almost any problem kids might have, alcohol increases that risk," Komro said. The researchers studied 5,812 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders from mostly low-income communities in Chicago, randomly dividing the neighborhoods into two groups: those who would participate in the prevention program and those who would not. The program, a tweaked version of what Komro and her colleagues developed for their Minnesota study, included three preventive approaches to relay the message that drinking is not acceptable in school, at home and in the community. At least 70 percent of the schools in the neighborhoods that did not use the program had some form of drug and alcohol prevention program in the schools. "While the findings may not be what the investigators were hoping for, they reported them fully and openly, and this is good for the field," said Brian Flay, a professor of public health and director of the Research Prevention Center at Oregon State University.
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