Nutritional Status and its Relationship with Substance Use Behavior among Adolescents Slum Dwellers of Guwahati

Purpose: Substance use poses a serious threat to the nutritional status of growing adolescents. Thus the study was conducted to assess the nutritional status of adolescent substance users living in the slums of Guwahati city and to evaluate the relationship between nutritional status and substance use behaviour. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from 1^st February till 31^st May 2014. Using the prevalence of substance use as 43.4%, absolute precision of 7% and design effect of 2, sample size was calculated as 401. Cluster sampling method was used to select 23 slums. From each slum, 18 adolescents (9 boys and 9 girls) were interviewed to get a total of 414 study subjects. For nutritional assessment, 24-hour dietary recall, Body Mass Index, and haemoglobin estimation was done. Data was analysed using SPSS 16.0. Results: Overall prevalence of substance users was 37.7% and current users was 35.0%. Anaemia was found to be significantly associated with substance use status. However, relationship between BMI, calorie deficit and substance use status was not found to be statistically significant. Conclusion: Relationship of anaemia with substance use behaviour invites more evidence based research for effective intervention. However, a temporal association could not be established between the two.