Publicly available data sources and prevalence of substance use in pregnant women, children and adolescents and the use of these data for patients' and clients' prevalence estimates
Abstract
Background: The identification of the data and data sources regarding the substance use among children, youth, and pregnant women is one of the starting points of the creation of an addiction treatment services network for this population. The gradually forming network of specialized addiction treatment services for children and youth necessarily brings the need to refine the estimates of potential clients and patients of these facilities in practice.
Methods: This overview article is based on the identification of publicly available data sources regarding the substance use among children, youth and pregnant women, including the so-called gray zone, and their descriptive analysis with an emphasis on number of individual substance users and gambling and gaming players. Findings and conclusions: In the population of children and youth there are up to 44,600 strong tobacco smokers, 114,400 people who drink alcohol excessively and 63,500 young people who use cannabis repeatedly.
About 2,750 people currently use methamphetamine and 2,100 young people use heroin and other opiates. Up to 5,070 adolescents used cocaine and about 3,460 people injected drugs during their lifetime.
The extent of substance use in children and youth and the availability of outpatient addiction treatment services do not correspond. The authors of the article tried to predict the actual prevalence of potencional clients and patients forming the network of specialized outpatient services but at the same time they also tried to outline the direction of future refinement of these estimates and possibilities of working with public data in this field.