Brief consultation may influence adolescent exercise, alcohol use and cigarette smoking habits

January 4, 2006

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A brief one-on-one consultation may increase exercise and decrease alcohol and cigarette use among adolescents for up to three months after the intervention with some positive effects still seen one year later, according to a new University of Florida study.

“We found long-term sustained effects of the intervention on both cigarette and marijuana use, and vigorous and moderate physical activity, among adolescents using marijuana and/or cigarettes prior to the consultation,” said Chad Werch, director of the Addictive & Health Behaviors Research Institute and the lead investigator on the study.

“These later findings suggest that the brief consult titled Project SPORT, provided by a trained health-care provider and lasting about 12 minutes in length, was particularly useful for those adolescents most in need of intervention because of their current drug consumption,” Werch said.

These results support a previous study by Werch and his colleagues suggesting that a brief sport-based consultation tailored to adolescent’s health habits may reduce alcohol use, while increasing exercise frequency.

“Currently, few studies of brief interventions have reported having effects on both co-morbid health damaging and health promoting behaviors such as Project SPORT,” Werch said.

“Given the challenges with implementing typical prevention programs in today’s schools which are focused on standards testing, brief interventions like Project SPORT may provide a more realistic alternative to reaching adolescents with critical prevention interventions than standard full-semester length curricula,” Werch said.

“Preventive intervention effects as extensive as those found in this study, involving numerous health behaviors and a range of important risk and protective factors, are relatively uncommon in the literature, especially among brief interventions,” Werch said. “Considering the short timeline of Project SPORT, these findings are particularly noteworthy and indicate that these types of personally delivered and integrated health communications are cost-effective,” he said.

To date, most health behavior programs are longer or more intensive, and target only a single risk behavior.

“The problem is that up until now, we have very few effective interventions that can modify multiple health behaviors of adolescents, particularly both health risk and health promoting behaviors,” Werch said.

Project SPORT is based on a new model for integrating the prevention of health risk behaviors, such as substance misuse, with the promotion of health-enhancing behaviors such as physical activity. This is accomplished by promoting images and attributes that youth value.

“This is what advertisers and marketers do all the time to motivate youth and adults to purchase their products and services,” Werch said. “By tapping into the images that youth value, such as being fit and in-shape, confident, and strong, we can both link and motivate multiple health behavior change,” he said.

This study appeared in the journal Prevention Science in November. In the study, 604 high school students were randomly assigned to receive the brief consult or commercially available health promotion materials. Differences between the two study groups were compared three months and 12 months after the implementation of the intervention.

The participants in Project SPORT demonstrated significant positive effects at three months post-intervention for alcohol consumption, alcohol initiation behaviors, alcohol use risk and protective factors, drug use behaviors, and exercise habits, and at 12 months for alcohol use risk and protective factors, cigarette use, and cigarette initiation. In addition, drug-using adolescents who received Project SPORT showed significant changes on alcohol consumption, drug use behaviors, and drug use initiation at three months, and drug use behaviors and exercise habits at 12 months.

“Another advantage of an intervention like Project SPORT is that it may be more successful in attracting and retaining adolescents to participate in the program, compared to common risk-based prevention programs because it emphasizes a positive, health promoting theme,” said Werch.

“Future research is needed to replicate these findings using adolescents from other settings, including different high schools, health clinics and worksites,” Werch said. “In addition, research is needed testing boosters or conducting follow-up interventions aimed at extending the effects obtained from brief interventions which, like for Project SPORT, appear to have a decreased impact as time goes on,” he said.

This study was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.