Brief, personality-targeted coping skills interventions and survival as a non-drug user over a 2-year period during adolescence

Selective interventions targeting personality risk are showing promise in the prevention of problematic drinking behavior, but their effect on illicit drug use has yet to be evaluated.

To investigate the efficacy of targeted coping skills interventions on illicit drug use in adolescents with personality risk factors for substance misuse.

Randomized controlled trial.

Secondary schools in London, United Kingdom.

A total of 5302 students were screened to identify 2028 students aged 13 to 16 years with elevated scores on self-report measures of hopelessness, anxiety sensitivity, impulsivity, and sensation seeking. Seven hundred thirty-two students provided parental consent to participate in this trial.

Participants were randomly assigned to a control no-intervention condition or a 2-session group coping skills intervention targeting 1 of 4 personality profiles.

The trial was designed and powered to primarily evaluate the effect of the intervention on the onset, prevalence, and frequency of illicit drug use over a 2-year period.

Intent-to-treat repeated-measures analyses on continuous measures of drug use revealed time x intervention effects on the number of drugs used (P < .01) and drug use frequency (P < .05), whereby the control group showed significant growth in the number of drugs used as well as more frequent drug use over the 2-year period relative to the intervention group. Survival analysis using logistic regression revealed that the intervention was associated with reduced odds of taking up the use of marijuana (beta = -0.3; robust SE = 0.2; P = .09; odds ratio = 0.7; 95% confidence interval, 0.5-1.0), cocaine (beta = -1.4; robust SE = 0.4; P < .001; odds ratio = 0.2; 95% confidence interval, 0.1-0.5), and other drugs (beta = -0.7; robust SE = 0.3; P = .03; odds ratio = 0.5; 95% confidence interval, 0.3-0.9) over the 24-month period.

This study extends the evidence that brief, personality-targeted interventions can prevent the onset and escalation of substance misuse in high-risk adolescents.

clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00344474.