Brief Intervention in Alcohol Intoxicated Adolescents-A Follow-up Study in an Access-to-Care Sample

Abstract

In the present study, N=88 children, adolescents and young adults were examined in the emergency unit of three municipal hospitals, who were receiving inpatient treatment there in the year 2008 due to acute alcohol intoxication (AAI). The sample consisted of 49% female (MD=16 years old) and 51% male patients (MD=17 years old). With regard to twelve months prevalence, it was the first AAI for 71% of the patients up to 16 years old, whereas for 47% of patients older 19 years it was at least the tenth AAI. All patients received a brief motivational intervention (BMI) which was designed to encourage them to seek youth-specific counselling after receiving hospital standard care. Of 88 youth, 15 (17%) accepted this offer, and 78 of 88 adolescents (89%) took part in a telephone-based 6-month follow-up. In an intent-to-treat analysis, alcohol prevalence (g/l for the last 30 days) decreased from t1 (M=544, SE=102) to t2 (M=2, SE=0.12). Therefore, the BMI under study appears to be effective in principle, is currently being manualised, and will be tested in a randomised-controlled study.

Drinking patterns of alcohol intoxicated adolescents in the emergency department: A latent class analysis

“…Descriptive information on samples of adolescent AAI patients in ED provide little reference on subgroups of risky drinkers, since they traditionally report means of one-dimensional measures for the entire sample and hereby obscure patterns of variable endorsement relevant for identifying high risk subgroups. For example, Stolle, Sack, Bröning, Baldus, and Thomasius (2013) reported a percentage of 68.2% of 12-21 year olds treated for AAI in an ED to screen positive for risky alcohol use in the RAFFT alcohol screening test, whereas Müller et al (2009) reported 24.2% of 11-17 year olds treated for AAI in an ED to consume 5 or more standard drinks on a typical drinking day and Reis, Pape, and Hassler (2009) found 23.4% regular alcohol users (at least weekly) in a similar sample of 10-17 year olds. These studies all report percentages between 11.3% and 15.9% of youth with repeated hospitalizations due to AAI, a characteristic certainly indicating repeated high-risk drinking, but the data from these studies also show the difficulty of determining "risky drinking" by a single indicator.…”