One in five high school students in the United States has taken a instruction medication that was not prescribed for them, a new survey shows.Conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the survey covers a diversity of risky behaviors among American youth.

Survey author Danice K. Eaton, a research scientist at the CDC mentioned that they are very worried that 20 percent of high school students are reporting this behavior. It can be unsafe to take a instruction drug that hasn’t been prescribed to you.

Studies have exposed that taking non-prescribed prescription drugs can lead to overdose, dependence and death, Eaton explained. Taking a prescription drug that hasn’t been prescribed to you is a health danger behavior.

The abuse of prescription drugs was widest among whites at 23 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17 percent, and black students at 12 percent.

Additionally, the abuse of recommendation drugs was most widespread among 12th graders (26 percent) and lowest among ninth graders (15 percent), the researchers found. But, prescription drug abuse was the same for boys and girls, at 20 percent.

This is the first time a query about prescription drugs has been asked in the survey, Eaton said. The next survey will be in 2011, with the data being released in 2012. This will be the first chance to see trends in the abuse of instruction drugs.

Meanwhile, the consciousness that there is such a high occurrence of prescription drug abuse among high school students is the major thing that we can emphasize from their statistics.Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said there are numerous recommendation drugs waiting to be ill-treated.

Educating teens about the possible harms of prescription drugs, and including conversation of prescription medications in all drug control programs, is necessary.

These findings were essentially identical as those in the last survey, which was done in 2007, the researchers distinguished.

Though, students are still engaging in other risky behaviors such as:

• 78 percent had not eaten fruits or vegetables five or more times daily in the week before the survey.
• 82 percent said they had not been physically active for at least an hour per day.
• 19 percent smoked cigarettes.
• 28 percent rode in a car driven by a person who had been drinking alcohol.
• 39 percent of sexually active students had had sex without using a condom.

The experts noted those numbers are similar to the 2007 numbers.