Around one in four children in the US- or 19 million children- live in a household where at least one parent has a substance use disorder (SUD). The corresponding study was published in JAMA Pediatrics.
"I'm an addiction doc, and so I think about this issue all the time. "Even still, I was surprised at how high that percentage was. It's just an enormous number of kids that are affected,” Dr. Scott Hadland, chief of adolescent medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, not involved in the study, told NPR.
"If one-quarter of kids in the U.S. have a parent with a substance use disorder, that tells us that every day in our clinics we are encountering many, if not dozens of families that are affected by substance use disorders. And we need to be poised and ready to help support those families,” he added.
The findings come from an analysis of nationally representative data from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH). Ultimately, the researchers estimated that close to 19 million children lived with at least one parent who met DSM-5 criteria for SUD.
Parental SUDs primarily consisted of alcohol use disorder, followed by cannabis, prescription-related, and non-cannabis drug use disorders.
The study further found that over 6 million children lived with a parent with comorbid SUD and mental illness, defined as major depressive disorder and/ or serious psychological distress.
There are limitations to the findings. Use of large-scale national surveys may have introduced potential sampling bias, selection bias, and self-report bias. Additionally, as the number of offspring per household was limited to three, the estimates may represent the lower bounds of youth exposure to parental SUD, wrote the researchers in their study.
“These findings signal the need for more attention at the federal, state, and local levels on the children and families affected by addiction. Evidence-based, family-based treatments for SUD and mental illness can prevent adverse health consequences in this population,” added the researchers.
Sources: News Medical, JAMA Pediatrics
