Analgesics, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and inhalers and, in less proportions, laxatives and diuretics, are the medicines more consumed by Andalusian young people according to a research work supervised by teacher Carmen Gómez Bueno, in collaboration with Eugenia Gil, Diana Hernández and José A. Morales.
The work, centred on the urban population between 12 and 16 years old, resident in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants of the Andalusian Autonomous Region, enrolled in the 1°, 2°, 3° and 4° courses of Compulsory Secondary Education during the academic year 2002-03′, has just been published by the University of Granada.
It has been subsidized by the Health Institute Carlos III of Madrid; the authors of this work carried out a research work on food disorders. Among other aspects, the research work included the application of a questionnaire about the habits of study, leisure time, consumption, health, food de and family to students of centres of compulsory secondary education in the ten biggest cities of Andalusia.
According to this study, Andalusian urban students enrolled in secondary compulsory education usually consume: cigarettes (12%), alcohol (5%), hash (3%) and designer drugs (1 %).
Tobacco consumption
In the same way, it can be deduced from the results of the survey that women consume much more tobacco than men. 14% of the girls consume tobacco regularly against 10.6% of boys. Men consume more hash; their consumption percentage is 5% and 1.7% for women.
According to the authors of this book, published by the University of Granada under the title: “Food disorders quantitative analysis”, the relationship between sex and alcohol and drug consumption is not statistically significant. To sum up, Andalusian students of secondary education consume more alcohol than tobacco or other substances. At the age of sixteen years old, 61.4 % of them do not smoke and 37.2 % do not drink alcohol. 81 % never consumes hashish and 95.2 % never uses designer drugs.
Food diets
As regards food diets, secondary education students do usually go on a diet. 25% of them say that they have gone on a diet in the last year. 43% of the women who study secondary education went once or more times on a diet in the previous year; 17% of men did.
This relation between sex and diet can be observed in all the members of a family. Going on a diet is a commonly followed practice among mothers and sisters, who do it more frequently than fathers and brothers.
According to the persons in charge of the study, “there is a strong family involvement on the nutritional education of the students. The families and the educative centre are the main educative centres in this context. However, there is a strong involvement of new nutritional educative agents such as magazines, friends and, to a lesser extent, internet”.
Medication
As regards medication, more than 60% of the young people asked have consumed analgesics in the previous quarter and 43% declare to have consumed antibiotics. There are differences by sex on drugs consumption. In general, girls consume more medicines than boys, and this difference affects both drugs available without prescription (analgesics and anti-inflammatories) and those available on prescription only, like antibiotics. In short, the data of the research work carried out by teacher Carmen Gómez Bueno and her group confirm the hypothesis about overmedication of women at an early age.
“Analysing medication consumption according to the academic years allows us –say the persons in charge of the study—to conclude that pharmacological drug consumption increases at the same time than academic years. Analgesic consumption increases from 49% in the first year of the ESO to 67% in the fourth year; anti-inflammatory consumption increases 10 points from the first to the fourth year of the ESO; antibiotic consumption is very high in all the courses and increases 10 points from the first to the second year of the ESO”.
Reference: Prof. Carmen Gómez Bueno.
Dpt. of Sociology.
University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 244188 and 670 415560.
E-mail: cgomez@goliat.ugr.es
