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 That’s because children taking ADHD drugs are more likely than other
kids to need special education services, to be chronically absent or
expelled, to get lower grades and to leave school before age 16, the
study found.
“Fewer girls are treated for ADHD, but when girls are diagnosed they
fare worse than boys with ADHD,” said senior study author Dr. Jill
Pell of the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
“Having ADHD had a bigger effect on girls than boys in terms of
having special education needs, being excluded from school, doing
worse on exams, being unemployed and needing to be admitted to the
hospital,” Pell said by email.
ADHD affects about 6.5 percent of kids, and is four times more
common in boys than in girls, researchers note in JAMA Pediatrics.
It can be hard to measure how kids with ADHD manage in school
because students with more severe symptoms or disruptive behaviors
tend to be diagnosed and medicated more often than children with
more subtle problems with focus or attention that don’t bother their
classmates or teachers.
Children with ADHD are more prone to difficulties with reading,
writing and executive function. Medication may help improve
concentration by controlling impulsivity and making kids feel
calmer.
For the current study, researchers examined data on 766,244 children
and teens attending school in Scotland between 2009 and 2013. This
included 7,413 kids taking medication for ADHD.
About 85 percent of the kids taking ADHD drugs were boys.
Compared to kids not being treated for ADHD, boys taking medication
for the disorder were more than three times as likely to get poor
grades in school. Girls on ADHD drugs, however, were more than five
times as likely to get poor grades.
Roughly 64 percent of students taking ADHD drugs dropped out of
school before age 16, compared with 28 percent of other students.
When they dropped out, boys with ADHD were 40 percent more likely
than kids without the disorder to be unemployed six months later.
For girls with ADHD, the risk of unemployment was 59 percent
greater.
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The study isn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove that ADHD
diagnosis or treatment directly causes educational problems. Another
limitation is the possibility that the ADHD group included only
severe cases when kids got medication, and excluded students with
milder forms of the disorder who didn’t receive drugs, the authors
note.
“Those children who receive medication typically are sicker than
those kids who do not receive medication treatment for ADHD,” said
Dr. Timothy Wilens, chief of the division of child and adolescent
psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“The severity of illness is what is really determining the outcome,
not the treatment,” Wilens, who wasn’t involved in the study, said
by email.
Even so, the study adds to a large body of evidence suggesting that
stimulant medication for ADHD may not be enough on its own to help
kids succeed, said Dr. William Pelham, director of the Center for
Children and Families at Florida International University in Miami.
“Childhood ADHD leads to a host of negative outcomes later in life,
and interventions that help with the three major domains that
predict later functioning - parenting, peer relationships, and
academic success - need to be used,” Pelham, who wasn’t involved in
the study, said by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2p92nC0 JAMA Pediatrics, online May 1, 2017.
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