Brain doping is widespread among students

Many students use medication to improve their performance

01/02/2013

Students in Germany increasingly resort to pills to improve their performance. The research team led by sports scientist Pavel Dietz from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz has studied the spread of so-called brain doping among students. Thus, every fifth student swallows stimulants to improve his cognitive performance.

According to the researchers, the use of stimulant pills at German universities is much more widespread than previously thought. While the study published by the HIS Institute for Research on Higher Education on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Health published about a year ago that only about five percent of students do brain doping, Dietz and colleagues now come to the conclusion that this is true for around 20 percent of students , Using an anonymous, specialized questionnaire, the researchers determined how many students take medication just to improve their cognitive performance and not to treat underlying mental illnesses such as attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, or sleep disorders.

One in five students is brain doping
Overall, the scientists of the Universities of Mainz and Tübingen interviewed 2,569 students in the study. They found that the „12-month prevalence for brain doping estimated 20 percent“ scam. Men used pills significantly more often to improve their cognitive performance than women, write Dietz and colleagues in the journal "Pharmacotherapy". For example, 23.7 percent of men used pills at least once in a year, while only 17 percent of women used brain doping. Also, there was a clear difference between the individual departments. Sports students most often resorted to stimulants to increase their cognitive performance, the researchers report. According to the scientists, 25.4 percent of sport students operated on brain doping, while in cultural studies, for example, only 21 percent, 20 percent in economics, and only 17 percent of students in medicine, psychology and natural sciences received impulsive funding. Brain doping was lowest for language students and pedagogic students, where only 12 percent of students sought to improve their performance with pharmaceuticals.

Brain doping among first-year students is most prevalent
The researchers also found that popular brain-doping drugs such as caffeine tablets or prescriptive Alzheimer's drugs, amphetamines and the ADHD drug Ritalin (methylphenidate), were increasingly abused by younger students for brain doping, while in the higher semester experiments significantly decrease the pharmacological improvement of cognitive performance. On average, 24.3 percent of the first semester students use brain doping, in later semesters, the proportion was only 16.7 percent, report Dietz and colleagues. Overall, however, brain doping is alarmingly widespread among younger and older students. (Fp)

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Picture: Gerd Altmann