Alcohol dependency in adolescents: Double jeopardy and fundamental updates

Abstract

Alcohol and drug abuse have emerged as a serious concern among adolescents in India. The transition to college involves major individual and contextual change in every domain of life; at the same time, heavy drinking and associated problems increase during this transition. For most students, heavy drinking and associated problems tend to peak during college amid the abundance of explicit and subtle expectations and opportunities to drink. In a few short years, the excessive drinking and concomitant negative consequences experienced by many students that would likely reflect diagnosable alcohol misuse at other points in the lifespan simply run their course and stop. The World Health Organization estimates that about 140 million people throughout the world suffer from alcohol dependence. Most alcoholics develop alcoholism during adolescence. The non-experimental descriptive research design was adopted for this study to assess the knowledge and attitude of adolescents towards alcoholism. The risk for dependency is interlinked to factors of exposure, genetics, neurobiology, behavior (personality) and experiences in the environment, which predispose the onset and continuation of substance use. Over the years, alcohol dependency settles on the individual and is identified when there is a loss of control over the decision to drink and the individual suffers the symptoms of drug withdrawal. Therefore, by identifying the risks for alcohol dependency to which adolescents are exposed, it is possible to intervene through actions specific to that group, that are capable of inhibiting/preventing substance use and interfering with the future dependency that can occur. Thus, this review aimed to review risk factors that contribute to dependency on alcohol among adolescents