Substance use and sociodemographic correlates among adolescents in a low-income sub Saharan setting

Background: the present study investigated the social and behavioral correlates of substanceuse, specifically bang or cocaine or similar drugs among a school-based sample of adolescents ina low-income urban settingmethods: the study utilized data on 2,176 school-attending adolescents aged 11-16 years indar es salaam (des) to examine social and behavioral correlates for lifetime substance use. thecorrelates under investigation included, demographic - age and gender; social - poverty,parent-adolescent relationship; behavioral – truancy, aggressive behavior, injury risk;psychological- depression and suicide ideation. bivariate and multivariate analyses were thencarried out on several variables identified from the 2006 tanzanian global school-based healthsurvey (gshs) questionnaire.results: approximately seven percent of school-attending adolescents (n=144) reported havingused an illicit substance at least once during their lifetime. after adding significantly associatedcovariates into a logistic regression model, we found that only truancy [or= 2.29 (ci=1.07–4.90)], suicide ideation [or=4.36 (2.32 – 8.19)] and parents who had checked their adolescents'homework (or=0.56 (ci=0.32 – 1.00)] were significantly associated with reported substanceuse.conclusions: our results suggest that health promotion programs should simultaneously targetmultiple factors associated with substance use behaviors among school-attending adolescents indar es salaam. they should take into account the range of psychosocial characteristics ofschool-attending adolescents which may be impacted by or result from substance use.