The pursuit of pleasure - a self-assessed global quality of life as a potential screening method for problematic use of drugs and alcohol.

BACKGROUND Notion of self-rated quality of life recently acquires more and more attention among health care professionals. The aim of this study is to determine whether one of the questionnaires measuring this theoretical concept, QOL10, could be applied to help to identify individuals who have problems with drug abuse. SUBJECTS AND METHODS QOL10 questionnaire complemented with several filtering questions has been administered to 200 students in various schools in Poland. RESULTS The correspondence between QOL10 and the willingness to take drugs is the strongest for QOL10 above 2.5. For QOL10 >2.5 a statistically significant positive correlation (r=0.464) has been observed between the frequency of use of psychoactive substances other than alcohol (drugs, medications) and the general quality of life. Therefore they might be considered as a risk group. CONCLUSIONS QOL10 proved to be quite a specific tool in detecting people who do not have problem with drug abuse. In spite of that, applying only QOL10 for the purposes studied does not provide conclusive grounds for detecting the problem of drug use. Nonetheless, it might be of help in serving as an indicator that some individuals belong to the risk group.