An examination of the association between early initiation of substance use and interrelated multilevel risk and protective factors among adolescents.

Carlos Andres Trujillo,Julie Maslowsky,Angela Trujillo,Diana Obando

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0225384

Carlos Andres Trujillo, Julie Maslowsky + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225384

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Dec 11, 2019
Citations: 23	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad de La Sabana

Abstract

One of the major goals of drug use prevention programs is to delay the age of onset of substance use. What is called early initiation, usually occurring in adolescents under the age of 15, is a salient predictor of Substance Use Disorders later in adulthood. The causes of early initiation are complex and multifaceted and this has led to the identification of a rich set of risk and protective factors that influence age of onset. Nonetheless, there is little knowledge about the interdependence of these factors in their impact on early initiation. This paper addresses this question by applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis to data on family, community and social risk and protective factors from over 1200 adolescents. We find that community and to a lesser extent social factors are the most clearly associated to early initiation and we compare our results to those obtained from linear regression analyses of the same data that do not incorporate interdependence and find opposite results. We discuss the differences between linear regressions and MCA to evaluate the interplay of risk and protective factors and the implications of our findings for health policy and the design of prevention interventions aimed at delaying age of onset.

Highlights

Initiation of substance use during adolescence is a salient predictor of Substance Use Disorders later in life [1] [2] [3] [4]
To examine the relationship between risk factors (RF) and protective factors (PF) and early initiation, we focused the analysis on the relative position of the three early initiation categories vis-à-vis the 17 RF and PF
The first result of this visualization is that all RF and PF categories show an expected overall pattern of monotonic relation with early initiation

Summary

Introduction

Initiation of substance use during adolescence is a salient predictor of Substance Use Disorders later in life [1] [2] [3] [4]. Delaying the age of initiation is one of the major goals of prevention programs targeting the young. There are risk factors (RF) and protective factors (PF) that influence age of initiation [3] [5] [6] but there is no clear blueprint on how to prioritize actions targeted at diminishing RF and enhancing PF. Empirically understudied in the literature, is the complex interdependence between RF and PF as they influence target behavior such as age of initiation. It is acknowledged that the interplay between RF and PF is highly relevant to explain specific behavioral patterns [7].

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