Nearly 1 million ADHD misdiagnoses, study says
Now studies are backing up anecdotal evidence that ADHD gets inappropriately applied to many children.
An analysis by economist Todd Elder at Michigan State University suggests that about 900,000 children who have been told they have ADHD in America may not have the condition at all. The study will appear in the Journal of Health Economics.
Elder found that how old a child is relative to peers in the same class also affects teacher perception of ADHD symptoms. In other words, teachers tended to perceive ADHD symptoms more in younger kids than older kids, even in the same grade. Younger children were also more likely to take stimulant medication for ADHD. The study authors suggest that children who are young for their grade may get an inappropriate diagnosis because teachers mistake their immaturity for ADHD.
The age at which a child starts school influences teachers’ perceptions of whether the child has ADHD-related symptoms, but does not as strongly affect the parents’ perceptions, the study said. Data for this research came from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort.
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ADHD drugs have no long-term growth effects: study
(Reuters Health) – Neither attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) nor medications used to treat it have a long-term impact on kids’ growth, a new study published online in The Journal of Pediatrics suggests.
Previous studies have shown that medication may make kids with ADHD eat less and grow slower than their peers without the condition – at least at first. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 10 percent of boys and 6 percent of girls have been diagnosed with ADHD.
“There have been concerns in the literature about the use of ADHD medications and their effect on growth,” Dr. Stephen Faraone, a psychiatrist at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, and one of the study’s authors, told Reuters Health. “We found that that (growth) delay tends to be most prominent in the first year or so, and tends to attenuate over time.”
Dr. Faraone and his colleagues measured and weighed 261 kids with and without ADHD that they had been following for at least ten years. Most of the kids with ADHD had spent at least some of that time on stimulants, such as Ritalin and Adderall.
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