Trends of Substance Abuse Among Adolescents in Australia: A Systematic Review

Running head: HEALTH ADVANCEMENT AND PROMOTION
HEALTH ADVANCEMENT AND PROMOTION
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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Evidence on the chosen topic.....................................................................................................2
Rationale for this review............................................................................................................3
Search strategy...........................................................................................................................3
Inclusion and exclusion criteria.................................................................................................4
Prisma diagram for search strategy............................................................................................6
Summary of the evidences.........................................................................................................7
Conclusion from the evidences..................................................................................................7
Study objective arisen from the evidence..................................................................................8
References..................................................................................................................................9

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Topic- Trends of substance abuse among the adolescents in Australia: A Systematic
review
Introduction
The teenage years are the critical window of vulnerability to the use of various kinds
of drugs and alcohol. This is because of the fact that the brain is still developing and
malleable and are yet to mature fully. The adolescents starts taking the substance from
probably the middle school and by the time these are adults about 70 percent of the high
school students will have tried alcohol or must have taken drugs for a non-medical purpose
(Victoria State government., 2012).
This paper will explore the evidences to study the trends of the substance abuse
among the adolescent population in Australia. Based on the evidences, some research gaps
will be identified which will be helpful in the construction of the objectives for future
research un this field.
Evidence on the chosen topic
According to the Australian secondary school students, use of tobacco, alcohol and
over the counter and illicit substances in 2011, three percent of the Australian middle school
students have tried amphetamines, around one in every six 12 to 6 years adolescents had
sniffed substances deliberately (Victoria State government., 2012). As per the National drug
Strategy Household survey (NDSHS) 2016, around 3.2 million of the Australians reported the
use of the illicit drug. The most common form of the drugs used by the Australians are
cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy. One of the alarming thing is as per the reports of The Youth
Support and Advocacy service, ice had become a primary drug of concern for the Australian
adults (Australian Government, Department of health., 2018). There had been a considerable

3HEALTH ADVANCEMENT AND PROMOTION
spike in the use of Ice (Metamphetamine) among the teenagers. According to Roxburgh et al.,
(2016), the use of methamphetamine has remained stable in Australia in spite of the several
health promotion strategies taken up to stop the use of Ice. According to the survey of
secondary school students, the cannabis use was found to be increased from 13.6 % to about
32.4 % within the year 2012- 2015. In spite of the health intervention campaigns, the drug
usage cannot be reduced. (Australian Government, Department of health, 2018)
Rationale for this review
A systematic review on the trends of the substance abuse among the Australian
adolescents will be helpful in the development of the innovative interventions for reducing
the rampant use of the substance abuse. Such researches can provide information about the
target population and the community based approaches that can be taken to eradicate this
issue from the grass root level.
Search strategy
Search strategy is the organized way to use proper key terms which will be used by
the researcher to find out several relevant research literatures available over databases. The
accuracy of the search strategy depends on the proper research question and usage of accurate
search terms against them (Al-Ani, Alsukker & Khushaba, 2013). To conduct a successful
search strategy, appropriate search items should be searched in proper data resources. For this
assignment, the data sources that were involved are Google Scholar, CINAHL Scopus,
PubMed and Cochrane within which English language research articles associated with
trends of substance abuse within the Australian adolescents were searched. Timeline selected
for the searched research articles was 2012 till date so that recent research articles related to
the topic could be identified. Searched terms that were chosen for the search strategy