News Release

Controlled study after Dutch café fire highlights teen mental-health problems after disasters

NB. Please note that if you are outside North America, the embargo for LANCET press material is 0001 hours UK Time Friday August 29 2003.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

The Lancet_DELETED

Dutch authors of a study in this week's issue of THE LANCET highlight the key mental-health outcomes for adolescents who have been directly involved in disaster situations. After a fire in a Dutch café over two years ago in which 14 teenagers died, the study investigators show that treating anxiety, depression, aggression, and alcohol abuse is a priority for mental-health interventions after disasters have occurred.

Disasters greatly affect the mental health of children and adolescents, but quantification of such effects is difficult. On New Year's Day, 2001, a fire in a café in Volendam, Netherlands, wounded 250 adolescents and killed 14. At the time of the disaster, 124 students (aged 12-15 years) of a school in Volendam--31 of whom were in the café at the time of the fire--and 830 students from two other schools in the Netherlands not involved in the café fire had previously been enrolled in a study on the effects of a school health-promotion programme to prevent behavioural and emotional problems, smoking initiation, excessive use of alcohol, and use of psychoactive substances. Data were available five months after the fire for around three-quarters of students enrolled in the original study.

Volendam adolescents had 75% increased rates of clinical overall mental-health symptom scores compared with the other students: scores for depression, anxiety, incoherent thinking and aggression were around three times greater than among students from the other two schools; alcohol abuse was more than four times more likely. There were similar increases in alcohol abuse and mental-health scores for Volendam students not directly involved in the café fire. These increases were larger for girls than boys.

Lead investigator Sijmen Reijneveld comments: "Postdisaster health care should be aimed at the physical and psychosocial consequences of disaster. Our results confirm the need for services to ameliorate the negative mental health effects of exposure to disaster, including anxiety, depression, incoherent thinking, aggression, and substance use, which commonly occur in combination with post-traumatic stress disorder…Our findings show that adolescents are inclined to react to severe stressful events with excessive use of alcohol. This might help policy-makers and researchers to incorporate prevention and treatment strategies to reduce excessive use of alcohol if a disaster involves adolescents, and to prevent alcohol dependence."

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Contact: Dr Sijmen A Reijneveld c/o Maarten Lörtzer, TNO Pressinfo;
T) 31-15-269-4975 or June Vasconcellos
T) 31-15-269-4905;
F) 31-15-262-7335;
E) pressinfo@tno.nl


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