# Development of practical screening tools to support targeted prevention of early, high-risk drinking substance use

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO · 2024 · $197,500

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
Early, high-risk drinking and drug use during adolescence conveys risk of both acute harms and long-term
consequences. NIDA has invested considerable resources in targeted prevention programs to reduce, delay, or
mitigate these outcomes. The public health impact of these programs is limited by the current lack of a method
to accurately and reliably identify which youth would benefit from these programs before they initiate substance
involvement. Existing screening instruments to quantify risk among substance-naïve youth were developed in
small, non-representative samples and have not yielded accurate and reliable predictions in new data.
Responding to RFA-DA-24-037, Accelerating the Pace of Drug Abuse Research Using Existing Data, we
propose to leverage the unprecedented Adolescent Brain and Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD) Study to
develop and conduct a preliminary validation of practical, accurate, and equitable screening tools for use in real-
world prevention settings. The ABCD Study® is large (N=11,880), sociodemographically diverse, spans 21 cities
across the U.S., measured every well-established risk/resilience factors for adolescent substance use, and will
be followed prospectively for 10 years, enabling us to distinguish adolescents with early, high-risk drinking/drug
use patterns from peers exhibiting developmentally normative, infrequent, and transient experimentation with
substances. Thus, no prior study has offered a better opportunity for developing accurate and generalizable
screening measures to quantify risk among substance-naïve youth. Aim 1: Develop a portfolio of brief, accurate,
equitable, and generalizable screening measures. Following a systematic algorithm designed to maximize
accuracy and eliminate inequities, we will construct and refine brief, survey-based measures quantifying risk for
early, high-risk drinking and drug use. Aim 2: Conduct a preliminary validation of the developed screening
measures in holdout data (n=5,000) weighted to be sociodemographically representative of all children in the
U.S Census. To anticipate the tools’ likely performance in real-world settings, we will obtain unbiased estimates
of screener performance in holdout data, then conduct sensitivity analyses probing potential limits on
generalizability. Together, these aims have potential to deliver screening tools that can unlock the public health
potential of existing targeted preventive interventions to reduce early, high-risk drinking/drug use, enabling wider
implementation at cost-effective scale. This developmental/exploratory research (R21) leverages existing data
to develop novel measures and conduct a preliminary validation. If we are successful at producing measures
that yield accurate and equitable screening decisions in holdout data, we will further refine and externally validate
the measure in a subsequent R01-scope project.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10930960
- **Project number:** 5R21DA058314-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO
- **Principal Investigator:** William Ellerbe Pelham III
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $197,500
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-09-30 → 2025-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10930960

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10930960, Development of practical screening tools to support targeted prevention of early, high-risk drinking substance use (5R21DA058314-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10930960. Licensed CC0.

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