Italy finds itself one of the world's leading countries for alcohol consumption. This problem is particularly relevant amongst adolescents. In the past 20 years many preventive interventions of alcohol abuse, addressed to adolescents, have been realized mainly in the United States.
Purpose of the study: To evaluate the effect of educational preventive interventions addressed to youths from 10 to 18 years old on alcohol use.
Materials and methods: We have done a systematic review of articles indexed on Medline between 1983 and July 1995. We also consulted the bibliography of the articles retrieved for further references. Randomized controlled trials using alcohol consumption as outcome measure have been included.
Results: Of the 100 articles found only 21 were included, in which 27 preventive programs, using 5 different types of intervention, were evaluated. Only 3 resulted effective on all the outcome measures utilized and 6 were partially effective. Overall the methodological quality was low.
Conclusions: The low methodological quality and the great variability of outcome measures utilized made it difficult to compare the results of different studies and impossible to reach definitive conclusions. All the studies were done in the United States and therefore their results cannot be presently generalized to Italy. Consequently, prior to implementing expensive prevention programs in the Italian schools, it would be opportune to perform further well-designed effectiveness trials.