[Smoking and young people; effectiveness of smoking prevention and cessation programmes]. / Roken en jongeren.

- In this article, we discuss the scientific knowledge on the effects of interventions that help young people to quit smoking and interventions that should prevent young people from starting to smoke.- We also describe the interventions in the Netherlands that, after a quality assessment, have been included in the database of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) Centre for Healthy Living.- Interventions have varying degrees of success in helping young people to quit smoking. There are only indications of a modest effect of behavioural interventions.- Preventive interventions mostly occur in a school setting and are making a modest contribution to the reduction of the number of young people that start smoking.- There are preliminary indications of the effectiveness of interventions in a medical setting. However, research into this is rare and there is no insight in long-term effects.- The database of the RIVM Centre for Healthy Living includes mainly preventive interventions in a school setting and only one smoking cessation intervention.

Effectiveness of a brief school-based intervention on depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, and delinquency: a cluster randomized controlled trial.

Problematic substance use and mental health problems often co-occur in adolescents. Effective school-based interventions that are brief and target multiple problems are promising in the field of health promotion. Preventure is a brief, school-based, selective preventive intervention, tailored to four personality profiles. Preventure has already proved effective on alcohol outcomes. Previous trials also reveal effects on several mental health outcomes, yet the evidence for these outcomes is limited. This study presents the results of the Dutch Preventure Trial, on a range of mental health outcomes. In a cluster RCT, including 699 high risk students (mean age 14 years), the intervention effects on mental health problems at 2, 6, and 12 months post intervention were tested in the total high risk population and in four specific personality groups. No significant intervention effects were found on 22 from the 24 tests. A positive intervention effect on anxiety was found in the anxiety sensitivity personality group at 12-month follow-up, and a negative intervention effect on depression was found at 12-month follow-up in the negative thinking group. In post hoc growth curve analyses these effects were not found. This study found no convincing evidence for the effectiveness of Preventure in The Netherlands on mental health problems. This finding is not in line with the results of an earlier effectiveness study in the UK. This highlights the need for more research into the knowledge transfer model of interventions, to ensure that interventions are effective in a variety of circumstances.

Predicting transitions in low and high levels of risk behavior from early to middle adolescence: the TRAILS study.

The present study examined the joint development of substance use and externalizing problems in early and middle adolescence. First, it was tested whether the relevant groups found in previous studies i.e., those with an early onset, a late onset, and no onset or low levels of risk behavior could be identified, while using a developmental model of a single, underlying construct of risk behavior. Second, departing from Moffitt's taxonomy of antisocial behavior, it was tested if early, but not late, onset risk behavior is predicted by a problematic risk profile in childhood. Data were used from TRAILS, a population based cohort study, starting at age 11 with two follow-ups at mean ages of 13.6 and 16.3 years. Latent transition analyses demonstrated that, both in early and middle adolescence, a single underlying construct of risk behavior, consisting of two classes (labeled as low and high risk behavior), adequately represented the data. Respondents could be clearly classified into four possible transition patterns from early to middle adolescence, with a transition from high to low being almost non-existent (2.5 %), low to low (39.4 %) and low to high (41.8 %) being the most prevalent, and high to high (16.2 %) substantial. As hypothesized, only the high-high group was characterized by a clear adverse predictor profile in late childhood, while the low-high group was not. This study demonstrates that the development of substance use is correlated with externalizing problems and underscores the theory that etiologies of early and later onset risk behavior are different.