10% of 10 year olds on drugs because of ADD/ADHD?!

[Marshmallowman]

hmm, it gets worse. I have been hearing these things about kids prescribed ritalin(and similar) selling there drugs to other kids.

Yesterday a group of kids in a highschool all scoffed a bunch of these tablets for fun(some took 15), so now there is a bunch of kids inhospital.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,18664266-1248,00.html

[Dr Mordrid]

Speaking as the parent of an ADHD kid, Chrisopher, I can say that in his case they did more harm than good. He metabolized them rapidly, which led to ever increasing doses and side effects. This cycle continued from age 7 to age 15 with us acting under the best medical advice available at the time from two large health systems.

After seeing many of the kids in our schools on such meds before and after I'd have to say his situation was anything but unusual. In many cases, Chris included, they made the kids nearly psychotic.

Twitchy or poorly trained teachers often have the highest percentage of "ADHD" kids in the classrooms due to the teachers inabilitiy to handle normal, active children. In one case in the wifes district all it took was to tone down the color scheme in the classroom. The teacher had put up bright colors all over the place in an attempt to "provide a stimulating environment". Damned room looked like a downsized version of the Las Vegas strip. Once the color scheme was toned down and the teacher re-educated as to what "stimulating" meant in the the educational sense the kids behavior toned down commensurately.

What did we do with Chris? After a particulary nasty post dose increase temper outburst we weaned him off the meds. With almost no provocation he had thrown a vacuum cleaner at my wife then torn a large segment of the bathrooms door frame off the wall and attacked me with it. A stiff right put him on the floor where we held him down until he calmed down. The behavior reminded me so much of a crack/meth addict "in the zone" that we began researching and discovered that this was not far from the truth for many kids on these meds.

Within 6 months he was no worse than when he started the meds, and in many ways much better. Now he's an adult, married, a dad himself and medication free.

Bottom line: "ADHD" and "autism" are the diagnosis of the decade when it comes to defining what makes "unruly" kids problematic. This doesn't necesarily mean that they actually have these disorders, just that their definitions have been expanded to cover a wider range of behaviors. In the UK they're even including ADHD as a related condition to autism.

IMO no more than 1% of kids, and probably less, should actually be on Ritalin etc., espcially now that serious side effects are coming to light. The others should be handled by other means, and in some cases the best treatment would be to put the teacher on Prozac as many times it's their problem and not the kids.

Dr. Mordrid

[Nowhere]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2128371,00.html

Perhaps article headline is a bit too much...but I'm willing to accept they promote treatments to conditions which were once accepted as "normal part of life".

[Dr Mordrid]

Not sure about some of the conditions they listed being "part of life", osteoporosis for one. Better examples: the massive overuse of Viagra & Cialis.

Dr. Mordrid

[KvHagedorn]

If they'd market Idun's apples, I would buy them.

[cjolley]

Here is an interesting take on the tonsillectomy for ADHD research:

http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2006/04/tonsillectomy_for_adhd.php

...
What they totally neglected to even mention was an alternative reason that the kids improved when they had their tonsils removed. I've mentioned previously something called PANDAS: Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections. PANDAS includes not only ADHD, but also other afflictions such as Tourette's syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). All three target the same area of the brain: the basal ganglia. This is the same portion afflicted in another disease triggered by streptococcal infection: Sydenham's chorea, a manifestation of rheumatic fever. One study of Sydenham's chorea patients, moreover, showed that approximately 70% of those questioned reported an episode of OCD-like behavior. Additionally, other studies have found significantly increased rates of rheumatic fever among the parents or grandparents of children who have been diagnosed with either Sydenham's chorea or PANDAS. Thus, children in the PANDAS group may have inherited a susceptibility to post-streptococcal sequelae similar to that reported for children with Sydenham's chorea. All of these lines of evidence point to a role for Strep pyogenes in the development of ADHD, OCD, and Tourette's syndrome.

How then does the tonsillectomy play into this? Streptococcal infections can, of course, be treated with antibiotics--Streptococcus pyogenes even remains highly susceptible to that old workhorse, penicillin. But these bacteria can play hide and seek: they can survive for quite some time within our own cells, which antibiotics can't penetrate, and where the bacteria remain protected from attack by our immune system. And the cells they typically hide in are located in the tonsils--so remove the tonsils, remove the reservoir of strep, disorder resolves--just as the authors of the Pediatrics study saw. Easy-peasy, right?

...