Drug Abuse Common among Distracted Teens with Poor Memory Skills: Study

Substance abuse is common among teens that are impulsive and have poor attention skills, finds a study.

Psychological researches say an individual's home environment, peer exposure, mental health, socio-economic status and personal relations are all linked to habits like drinking, smoking and doing drugs. A new study by the University of Oregon found traits like being impulsive, poor memory and executive attention skills in young adults help determine their possibility of becoming addicted to drugs.

The experts observed a group of 382 adolescents aged about 11 and 13 who were at risk of engaging in substance abuse. They noted subjects who were easily distracted while working on a task and had low executive attention skills were likely to try out and experiment with marijuana, alcohol and tobacco. But, not every person who experiments with drugs at an early age will become an addict, believe the authors, reports the Psych Central.

"There could be some individuals who start early, experiment and then stop. And there are some who could start early and go on into a progressive trajectory of continued drug use. We wanted to know what separates the two," said Atika Khurana, researcher and a professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology and Human Services from the University of Oregon, reports the Daily Mail.

"By its nature, greater executive attention enables one to be less impulsive in one's decisions and actions because you are focused and able to control impulses generated by events around you. What we found is that if teens are performing poorly on working memory tasks that tap into executive attention, they are more likely to engage in impulsive drug-use behaviors," Khurana adds.

The study findings can serve as an additional method to identify at risk teenagers and develop early intervention strategies to prevent drug addiction and abuse. The authors urge families to support children with poor memory and attention skills and practise problem solving tasks to increase cognition.

More information is available online in the journal Development and Psychopathology.