For American Indian adolescents, the trauma of being exposed to assault leads to alcohol use and its consequences

In their May article in the journal, Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, authors Spillane et al. examine the effects of trauma, specifically assaultive (physical and sexual) trauma, on American Indian (AI) adolescents. The authors wanted to learn to what degree such trauma exposure impacts AI adolescents’ risk of alcohol use and its consequences. Spillane et al. also wanted to know whether exposure to multiple assaultive traumas increases this risk. In order to find out, Spillane et al. conducted a secondary analysis of a dataset drawn from a larger sample of respondents in Drug Use Among Young American Indians: Epidemiology and Prediction, 1993-2006 and 2009-2013 (ICPSR 35062). This study contains responses from a sample of 5,744 students in grades 7-12, in schools on or near reservations from across the US, who took part in annual surveys from 1993 to 2000; 2001 to 2006; and 2009 to 2013. Distributed by the National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP), the study’s main purpose was to assess the levels and patterns of substance use among AI adolescents. For their analysis, the authors looked at data collected between 2009 and 2013 from 3,498 AI students between the ages of 10 and 21, from a sample of schools determined to be representative of AI adolescents nationally. Spillane et al. were most interested in variables indicating trauma exposure, alcohol consumption, and the lifetime alcohol-related consequences respondents experienced. They found that almost half of the adolescents in their sample experienced at least one assaultive trauma in their lifetime, and those who did were more likely to report lifetime alcohol use. This is significantly higher than rates observed in the general US population. And the students in the sample experienced “greater alcohol-related consequences than those with no [specifically] assaultive trauma exposure.” Further, Spillane et al. found that “a greater number of assaultive traumatic events was significantly associated with greater odds of lifetime alcohol use” and more alcohol-related consequences.