Cognitive profiles of adolescent inpatients with substance use disorder
Publication date
2022-05-21
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
Publisher
MDPI
Series or journal
Children
ISSN
Periodical volume
9
Periodical issue
5
Article ID
756
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Keyword
Substance use disorder
Cannabis
Alcohol
Cognitive profile
WISC-V
WAIS-IV
Intelligence
Full Scale IQ
Processing speed
Abstract
The prevalence of substance abuse is high during adolescence, and several studies have linked the use of alcohol and cannabis in adolescence to different cognitive impairments. To investigate whether specific cognitive deficits can be observed in adolescents with substance use disorder (SUD), we compared the cognitive profiles of inpatient adolescents diagnosed with SUD to a control group matched for sex, age and educational status. The inpatient adolescents received diagnoses of cannabis use disorder, alcohol use disorder or both. We compared the WISC-V profiles of 22 inpatients (45.5% female, Mage: 14.5; SD: 0.8) and the WAIS-IV profiles of 27 inpatients (44.4% female, Mage: 17.1; SD: 0.9) to 49 matched control participants with no diagnosed SUD. At the time of testing, participants were hospitalized for treatment of their SUD and were abstinent for a period of at least 6 weeks. To gain greater power, we jointly analyzed the Verbal Comprehension Index, Working Memory Index, Processing Speed Index and Full Scale IQ as assessed by WISC-V and WAIS-IV. The clinical group performed significantly worse than the control group on all the above indices. When only the group of inpatients was observed, in a model with the factors sex, educational status, presence of a comorbid diagnosis of depression and the number of comorbid diagnoses, only the factor educational status was significantly associated with the Full Scale IQ, whereas the factors sex and a comorbid diagnosis of depression in this group were associated with the Processing Speed Index. The results show that adolescents diagnosed with SUD (cannabis and/or alcohol) display broad cognitive impairments after 6 weeks of abstinence. Future research is required to further explore the role of comorbid diagnoses.
Description
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Cite as
Becker, A. B. C., Lüken, L. M., Kelker, L., Holtmann, M., Daseking, M., & Legenbauer, T. (2022). Cognitive Profiles of Adolescent Inpatients with Substance Use Disorder. Children, 9(5), 756. https://doi.org/10.3390/children9050756
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Published version
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