preview

Substance Development Research Paper

Decent Essays

There are multiple developmental pathways to substance use disorders, with the risk factors that can start an individual down one of these pathways ranging from the genetic to the sociocultural. Because these factors tend to cluster and can vary with age, disentangling their unique contributions can be difficult. Consequently, a focus on the stages of development is key. This chapter looks at the latest research on the different risk factors at play during a person’s development, including:
• Genetic factors (i.e., the fact that the risk for substance runs in families), which are estimated to contribute 40–60 percent of vulnerability to drug abuse;
• Early brain development, looking particularly at how disruptions in the development of the …show more content…

In most cases, these behaviours subside as a child matures. In about 25 percent of children, though, these behaviours are unusually elevated and persistent, expressing themselves as an enduring mixture of features that include social gregariousness, risky thrill-seeking, emotionality and irritability.
These externalizing behaviours are predictive of various child- and adolescent-onset disruptive behavioural disorders (DBDs), including oppositional defiant disorder in the preschool years, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder in the elementary school years, and conduct disorder in middle childhood through adolescence. By adolescence, these DBDs increase the risk for substance use disorders: compared to those without DBDs, individuals with DBDs have double the risk of abusing tobacco, triple the risk of abusing alcohol, and five times the risk of abusing illicit drugs. Indeed, 75 percent of adolescents with a DBD become substance abusers in adulthood and 50 percent of adults with substance use disorders had a history of at least one DBD in childhood or

Get Access