Impact of Educational Intervention on Prevention of Adolescent Substance Use Disorders in Low and Middle Income Countries: A Systematic Review Protocol

Many unhealthy behaviors like addiction to harmful substance such as smoking, drinking, drug use often begin during adolescence, and leads to morbidity and mortality in low and middle income countries represent major public health challenge. We are going to conduct an overview of systematic review to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention to prevent adolescent substance abuse. The objectives of the review are to identify various interventions on prevention of adolescent substance abuse in LMICs, to provide evidence for effectiveness of such interventions and to identify the delivery platform of identified interventions. Method and analysis: An overview of systematic review will be carried out based on Cochrane handbook for systematic reviews of interventions. The review will include systematic reviews that have included RCTs and quasi experimental studies and adolescent population in low LMICs. We will include any educational / psychosocial interventions that directly or indirectly affect substance use prevention. Databases such as EMBASE, PubMed, Medline, Cinhal and Psychinfo will be searched from January 2021 to June 2021. Additionally, important government websites and references of the included studies will be scanned to identify potential records. Three authors, independently, will carry out screening and data extraction. Studies will be categorized in to various themes for the purpose of analyzing and reporting the results. Ethics and dissemination: This review will be based on published studies and will not include human participants directly; therefore, ethical clearance is not applicable. We will disseminate the final overview findings in a peer-reviewed journal.