Teen Drug Abuse Treatment Review
Citation: Outpatient interventions for adolescent substance abuse: A quality of evidence review. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Vol 76(4) Aug 2008, 531-543. Authors: Becker, Sara J; Curry, John F.
This review compared 31 randomized clinical trials of teen drug abuse treatments on the basis of the research methods used in the studies. The authors evaluated the studies based on a number of attributes that they consider to be established methods of preventing bias, and noted that most of these bias-preventing attributes were neglected in the majority of clinical trials under review.
Problems With The Current Studies On Teen Drug Abuse Treatment
The authors are highly critical of the methods of all of the studies under consideration. For example, while randomization of study participants was a prerequisite for inclusion in their review, they found that few of the studies reported on the measures that had been taken to ensure random assignment of the teen drug abusers involved. The authors report that the majority of the studies they looked at had used samples so small that they were at risk for failing to find positive treatment effects that a larger study would have found. They note that most studies failed to identify the primary hypotheses being tested, thereby putting the results at risk of overinterpreting the data through the analysis of multiple outcomes.
Fewer than 20% of the studies under review reported adequate blinding in the assessment of treatment outcomes, and fewer than 33% included all study participants in the final analysis. Nearly 20% of the studies billed as randomized clinical trials failed to use purely random methods to assign teenage drug abuse patients into treatment groups.
Effective Treatments for Teen Drug Abuse
Taking all of these methodological considerations into account, the authors state that the secondary goal of their study was to “evaluate the quality of evidence in support of different treatment models.” Some of the stronger teen drug abuse treatment modalities, picked from the most methodologically sound studies included in the review, included:
- Ecological Family Therapy
- Brief Motivational Intervention
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Of the treatment methods under review, teen drug abuse group therapy was the only one that was found to be ineffective in more than one of the better-quality studies under review.
The authors also note that research in the area of adolescent substance abuse is extremely challenging to perform, and that research methods in this area have improved over the past 2 decades. However, they assert that there is still a great deal of improvement to be made in this area in order that these studies can provide us with good quality information on the likelihood of teen drug abuse treatments to affect the desired outcomes.
Tags: adolescent, family, intervention, substance abuseRelated posts
Drug Abuse, Teen Drug Abuse • August 2008