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Reply to "Has your kid's physician said anything about possible long-term side effects of ADHD meds? "
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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And which one, if you don't mind sharing? Thanks in advance. [/quote] When we made the decision to medicate our child, the relevant professionals (there were several) all generally dismissed the possibility of long-term side effects on brain development, largely on the same basis discussed up thread: “no evidence.” (They did acknowledge the potential risk on growth.) In their defense, this is a true statement, because—shockingly to me—the question appears to be basically unstudied, I spent a huge amount of time looking and found very little on the question of long-term effects on brain development (which, if i recall correctly boiled down to one recent study that found detectable differences of uncertain significance). What long-term studies have been done, at least that I found, focused on efficacy (debatable over the long-term) or studying potential increased risk of drug abuse, cardiac events, etc. (which didn’t seem like a serious risk to me based on what I read). My bottom-line take-away, from the perspective of a lay parent who actually had to make the decision, is that there is a lot more uncertainty than people typically acknowledge, but no obvious red flags. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence for any kind of gross physical or mental risk from the drugs; to the extent there are side effects, it seems they must be relatively subtle or rare (again, based on what I read). That may be sufficient for population-level treatment recommendations, so I am not making any kind of conspiratorial claim here; but it was unsatisfying when trying to understand the kinds of risks an individual child may face from these drugs. If you are facing this decision, it sucks, but that is basically the state of human knowledge you will need to use to decide, and it isn’t going to change anytime soon. Ultimately, I decided it was worth the risk, but was and still am a bit conflicted about it. The most helpful reference I ever found was a blog post on the blog Slate Star Codex called something like “Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know” (the blog has since been deleted, but you could try to find the post archived somewhere, it is written by a psychiatrist and is extremely exhaustive in terms of summarizing the research, much better than anything I found anywhere else.) I’ve tried to mitigate the risk to the extent possible by going with the medication with the longest track record (e.g. Ritalin), keeping the dosage down to the extent possible and taking frequent breaks. It has been effective in the short-term (three years or so), so there has been a benefit. The bottom line is that nobody knows whether there are long-term side effects on brain development. You pays your money and you takes your choice. [/quote]
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