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ADHD meds may be a prescription for bullying

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From 2003 to 2011, there was a 42 p.c improve  in ADHD instances identified within the U.S., and between 2007 and 2011, there was a 27 p.c improve in stimulant-treated ADHD. Credit score: Picture courtesy of College of Michigan -Children and youths who take drugs like Ritalin to deal with attention-deficit hyperactivity dysfunction are twice as prone to be bodily or emotionally bullied by friends than those that haven't got ADHD, a brand new College of Michigan examine discovered. At even larger danger had been center and highschool college students who offered or shared their medications--those children had been four-and-a-half occasions likelier to be victimized by friends than children with out ADHD. The primary findings are the identical for each sexes, stated the examine's first writer, Quyen Epstein-Ngo, analysis assistant professor on the U-M Institute for Analysis on Ladies and Gender and a fel...
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Children who take ADHD medicines have trouble sleeping, new study shows

The study addresses decades of conflicting opinions and evidence about the medications' effect on sleep. In what's known as a "meta-analysis," researchers from the UNL Department of Psychology combined and analyzed the results from past studies of how ADHD medications affect sleep. In a study published online by the journal  Pediatrics , the Nebraska researchers found children given the medicines take significantly longer to fall asleep, have poorer quality sleep, and sleep for shorter periods. "We would recommend that pediatricians frequently monitor children with ADHD who are prescribed stimulants for potential adverse effects on sleep," said Katie Kidwell, a psychology doctoral student who served as the study's lead author. About 1 in 14 children and adolescents in the U.S. are diagnosed with ADHD, a chronic condition that includes attention difficulty, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. In the most common form of ADHD treatment, about 3.5 mil...
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Researchers urge caution in prescribing commonly used drug to treat ADHD

The Cochrane Library publishes one of the most comprehensive assessments to date on the benefits and harms of a widely prescribed drug used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD is one of the most commonly diagnosed childhood disorders and can continue through adolescence into adulthood. Symptoms include difficulty focusing attention and remaining "on task," excessively impulsive behaviour, and extreme hyperactivity. It is estimated to affect about 5% of children, and diagnosis is based on clinical judgement rather than objective diagnostic markers. Methylphenidate, more commonly known by its brand names -- Ritalin®, Concerta®, Medikinet®, and Equasym®, amongst others -- has been used to treat ADHD for more than 50 years. A team of Cochrane researchers has carefully evaluated and summarized the findings from all of the available randomized trials of this widely used drug. This new Cochrane Review includes data from 185 randomized controll...
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New report finds 43 percent increase in ADHD diagnosis for US schoolchildren

The research also uncovered a surprising increase in ADHD among girls during the study time frame. "We found the parent-reported prevalence for girls diagnosed with ADHD rose from 4.3 percent in 2003 to 7.3 percent in 2011. That's an increase of 55 percent over an eight year period," Cleary says, adding: "Traditionally, boys have been more likely to get a diagnosis of ADHD." The report, published online in  The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry , was based on data sponsored by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a National Children's Survey from 2003-2011. Cleary and his co-author Kevin P. Collins of Mathematica Policy Research mined the data looking for trends in parent-reported prevalence of ADHD. "We found rising rates of ADHD overall and very sharp jumps in certain subgroups," Cleary said, adding that for adolescents the diagnosis jumped ...
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Interactions between attention-grabbing brain networks weak in ADHD, study says

The degree of weakness was correlated to the severity of the children's inattention symptoms, the researchers found. The study will be published online Dec. 15 in  Biological Psychiatry . The researchers focused on the salience network , which is a set of brain regions that work together through well-synchronized neural activity to help decide where one's attention should be directed. In most children, this network can assess the importance of internal and external events, and then regulate other thoughts to focus attention in the right place. "A lot of things may be happening in one's environment , but only some grab our attention," said Vinod Menon, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the study's senior author. "The salience network helps us stop daydreaming or thinking about something that happened yesterday so we can focus on the task at hand. We found that this network's ability to regulate interactions with other b...
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Distractibility trait predisposes some to attentional lapses

"We all know from personal experience that some people appear to be more prone to lapses of attention than others. At the same time, we know that inattention and distractibility characterize people with a clinical diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)," says study author Nilli Lavie of University College London. "This led us to hypothesize that there might be an attention -distractibility trait that all of us have to some degree, and the clinical end of the spectrum is seen as ADHD." To investigate whether such a continuous trait exists, Lavie and co-author Sophie Forster had a healthy sample of 174 adults complete computerized tasks that measured their distractibility. The participants searched brief computerized displays for a 'target' letter among a circle of letters, pressing a key as soon as they found it. On 25% of the 384 trials, a distracting image of a well-known cartoon character appeared above or below the circle of ...
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Children's ADHD symptoms and peer relationships influence each other over time

The study was conducted by scientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Social Research division, the Regional Centre for Child and Youth Mental Health and Child Welfare in Trondheim, Norway, and the University of California, Davis. It appears in the journal  Child Development . "ADHD predicts poor relations with peers, but do poor relations with peers affect symptoms of ADHD, forming, in effect, a vicious cycle?" asks Frode Stenseng, associate professor of psychology at NTNU and the study's lead author. "We found that more ADHD symptoms at age 4 predicted more rejection by peers at age 6, and reciprocally, that greater peer rejection at age 4 predicted more symptoms of ADHD at age 6. But these effects were less evident from ages 6 to 8." "The bottom line is that peer rejection and ADHD symptoms are related, but they may also affect each other over time," adds Jay Belsky, Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor of Hum...
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