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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have recommended this on this forum before, and just keep adding it to threads because I feel like it was a disservice that it was not offered as a first line for DS….

But we are doing stimulant combined with non stimulant. Ds is on meds primarily for hyperactivity. He needed a pretty high stim to be able to get thru a school day without getting sent to the office, but that meant high side effects (dulling personality) and come down at night. By adding a non stim, we were able to lower the stim dose by more than half so virtually eliminated side effects, his days are much more steady (no super hyper in the am and pm - just well behaved all day), plus we have the benefit that the non stim is very sleep inducing. So our kid who used to happily stay up until midnight in K is consistently falling asleep by 9pm- which can’t hurt, right? We’ve tried reducing the stimulant but he still needs some to get thru school. But this has been a great answer for us. Downsides of non stim is typically sleepiness or lethargy, which well, was not a problem for our insanely high energy hyper kid. A little lethargy was good to add….

Maybe isn’t right for you, but I wish someone had suggested this way before we got to the point of “everything else has failed”. I think it should be a first line approach for young kids diagnosed with hyperactive primary type adhd. [/quote]

Thanks for sharing. Would you mind saying which stim and nonnstim he is on, how old he is, and what, more specifically, his behavioral problems were? I'm wondering if this might be a good combo for our severely irritable and angry ADHD kid who hasn't responded well to SSRIs or mood stabilizers, probably because the irritability really stems from a severe form of ADHD.[/quote]

I'm the PP you're responding to.  Yes, he was diagnosed at age 3 with severe adhd.  We started him on a stim at age 4.5, because otherwise he would have been thrown out of multiple preschools. He's very hyper, and very physical.  I think the chaos of school and other people disregulatates him, and he will random body check other kids, pull their arms, yank their head.  It's nonsensical. He's not emotionally disregulated; just has this weird physical outlet on chaos.  We tried a bunch of stims between ages 4 and 7. They were all pretty decent on keeping his behavior manageable during school, but we felt like he was a walking zombie of himself, and didn't love how wired he was in the evenings and in the am.  We eventually settled on concerta as the best stim for him, he was on 45 mg for a year or so with full success at school. Anything less than that, and we were getting almost daily feedback from teachers that he was not well behaved.  But mom and dad didn't like how empty it left him. That's when we tried adding kapvay, and ultimately ended up on 0.3 mg a day, .1mg in the am and .3 mg in the evening, and then we started pulling back on his stim where we ultimately ended up on 18mg of concerta. He had 2 years of successful school at that level. Now he's on 27 mg of concerta as he's gotten older, plus 0.3mg of kapvay.  His days are so much smoother, and personality seems more like his true self.   [/quote]

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