Profile of Undergraduate Student Caffeine Users/Abusers in Benin City, Nigeria

Abstract

Undergraduate students have been reported to use caffeine and caffeine is known to have multiple untoward medical and psychiatric or psychological effects. Knowing the profile of caffeine users may help in the control of its abuse. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 500 undergraduate students. The instrument that was used consisted of socio-demographic characteristics and a modification of the Stimulant Use section of the World Health Organisation Questionnaire for Student Drug Use Surveys; under standard ethical conditions. The statistics used were univariate analysis and Chi-square test and power of significance was set at less than or equal to 0.05. A total of 485 instruments were analysed; others were not analysed because they were not returned or had missing data. The current prevalence of caffeine use was 39.6%; only being from a polygamous family, family where parents quarrel a lot and Faculty of Education were significantly associated with current caffeine use. Individuals from polygamous background will deserve special attention in a bid to control caffeine use while parents will need to maintain a cordial relationship at least in the interest of their children. Since caffeine has been listed as one of the gateway substance, the control of caffeine use may help to check the use of hard drugs. Stakeholders need to beam more light on the Faculty of Education to unravel the association between the faculty and caffeine use.

Keywords: Caffeine, gateway, hard drugs/substances, profile, caffeine users/abusers