Young teenagers who are victims of being bullied around are more likely to take medications than their peers will, a Danish study shows.
There is fear that this early use of medicine is used for coping, which can lead to unhealthy patterns of medicine use into adulthood. In a survey, 5,200 students ranging from 11 to 16 from schools in Denmark provided information on health problems, medicine use, bullying and a range of psychological and social conditions. Roughly half of those students had experienced some form of bullying within the current school term.
That early exposure to bullying was associated not only with increased occurrences of headache, stomachache, nervousness and sleep trouble, but also with an increasing use of drugs to to help treat these symptoms. Teenagers who are victims of bullying use medicine for pains and psychological problems more often than young teens who were not bullied.
The most commonly used medications were for treating headache. About 40 percent of those students said they use medicines for headache on a monthly basis, while among children who are bullied, more that 60 percent use medicine monthly for those same symptoms - which means, if my math is right, that almost two thirds of bullied children use medicines against headache on a monthly basis.
Bullying can be destructive for children's lives and its been shown in a previous international studies that 28 countries from Europe and North America that children have a much higher risk for a wide range of symptoms if they are bullied. The current studies going on now are highlighting yet another reason to take steps to prevent bullying to help avoid harmful patterns of excess medicine use among young teenagers.
