Clinical Practice Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2018. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Psychiatr. Mar 22, 2018; 8(1): 33-42
Published online Mar 22, 2018. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v8.i1.33
Factors associated with tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use among youth living in West Central Mexico
Octavio Campollo, Payam Sheikhattari, Cesar Alvarez, Jaime Toro-Guerrero, Hector Sanchez Avila, Fernando A Wagner
Octavio Campollo, Jaime Toro-Guerrero, Hector Sanchez Avila, Center of Studies on Alcohol and Addictions, Antiguo Hospital Civil de Guadalajara, Department of Medical Clinics, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Jal CP 44280, Mexico
Payam Sheikhattari, Prevention Sciences Research Center and School of Community Health and Policy, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD 21251, United States
Cesar Alvarez, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, NeuroCure Clinical Research Center, Berlin 10117, Germany
Fernando A Wagner, School of Social Work, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD 21250, United States
Author contributions: Campollo O contributed to study conception and design, data acquisition, writing, reviewing and editing of the manuscript; Sheikhattari P and Wagner FA contributed to the data analysis and interpretation, writing, reviewing and final approval of article; Alvarez C, Toro-Guerrero J and Sanchez Avil H contributed to data acquisition and preliminary data analysis.
Supported by The National Council of Science and Technology-Sistema Morelos, CONACYT-SIMORELOS, No. 19980302013.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Universidad de Guadalajara.
Informed consent statement: We are requesting a waiver for this document.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There are no conflicts of interest arising from this work.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Octavio Campollo, MD, MSc, PhD, Doctor, Full Professor, Professor, Director, Center of Studies on Alcohol and Addictions, Antiguo Hospital Civil de Guadalajara, Department of Medical Clinics, Universidad de Guadalajara, Calle Hospital 278, Col. El Retiro, Guadalajara, Jal CP 44280, Mexico. calcohol@hotmail.com
Telephone: +52-33-36142179
Received: October 27, 2017
Peer-review started: November 4, 2017
First decision: December 11, 2017
Revised: December 23, 2017
Accepted: January 19, 2018
Article in press: February 8, 2018
Published online: March 22, 2018
Processing time: 137 Days and 11.4 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Drug and substance use is a public health problem around the world. Prevention efforts are carried out with varying results. One of the main targets in prevention is the risk factors associated with drug use. There are several instruments to study the risk factors which provide critical information to establish guidelines to control and prevent drug use. We used a well known validated and accepted instrument (drug use screening inventory) to investigate the prevalence and psychosocial factors associated with tobacco, alcohol and drug use in high school students in Mexico. We found higher prevalence of substance use than expected: 44% of the students had smoked tobacco and one in five students was a current smoker while over 40% had history of binge drinking. On the other hand, 6.8% of the students reported having used marijuana, cocaine, or both. Behavioral problems, deviant peer affiliation, and troubled families were independently associated with drug use. These results will help in the application of control and prevention programs among high school students. This is the first survey representative of a West Central state in Mexico: Jalisco which is an important Mexican state because it has a significant drug production and trafficking problem, and on the other hand, it provides a great number of migrants to the United States creating social, cultural and health problems associated with risk behaviors.