Teenage substance abuse: study finds U.S. services patchy

It is estimated that 1.4 million teenagers in the U.S. need help for substance abuse but previous research has found that only about a tenth of them get treatment. A review of services by researchers at the University of Kentucky found that there were few programmes that offered high-quality treatment designed specifically for adolescents. The review looked at 700 treatment programmes and found that less than a third had specialized services for teenagers with some excluding underage programmes altogether and others integrating them with adult patients. Few of the programmes scored highly on all aspects of quality but the 30% of programmes that included intensive inpatient or residential treatment tended to be of higher quality.

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