Reply to Do kids ever outgrow the need for ADHD medication?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am always surprised how little research people do on this. The evidence is that ADHD meds do not improve school performance in the long term. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323368704578593660384362292[/quote]

I can't read that particular article since I don't subscribe to WSJ, but I have read other articles published around the same time, including several that quoted/cited the WSJ article. From what I've read, the evidence on impact on grades/academic performance is much more mixed than you're presenting it, with some studies finding an improvement in long-term performance. Also, some of the studies referenced as supporting the notion that medication doesn't help are from the 70s, back when both understand of ADHD and available medication options were very different than they are today, reducing the relevance of that research to modern treatment. Finally, as someone else said, treatment of ADHD is about so much more than just grades; to suggest otherwise is deeply ignorant.[/quote]

Pp you are correct: the effects observed are extremely mixed depending on study population and design. And really, none have accomplished what we all really want to know as they do a poor job at systematically following families over time and collecting data in a standardized way during that process. There is a preschool one from Hopkins that did a slightly better job at this, but they ironically even seemed to miss discussing one of the main messages from their own data... At the end of their follow up time, medicated ADHD kids still lagged behind kids without ADHD in the ADHD severity scale and other measures they used. However, the medicated kids also showed a major increase in gains when they started meds relative to non ADHD kids, and they maintained those gains over time! So while they still were maybe lower than non ADHD kids at the end (which is what the authors focused on), these kids significantly closed the gap once they started meds.

The problem is many of the people conducting these studies aren't that savvy with methodology and so they rely on biostatisticians for help who are less aware of the biological mechanisms and relevant nuances of the data.

And then some reporter from a newspaper decides to play scientist and make wide sweeping statements that even they can't possibly understand the origins of.[/quote]

Well, this is what the Hopkins press release form 2013 has to say about the study:

" The study shows that nearly 90 percent of the 186 youngsters followed continued to struggle with ADHD symptoms six years after diagnosis. [b]Children taking ADHD medication had just as severe symptoms as those who were medication-free, the study found[/b]."

http://www.hopkinschildrens.org/ADHD-Symptoms-Persist-for-Most-Young-Children-Despite-Treatment.aspx

I am sure that ADHD meds make a difference for some kids -- but the fact is that you should understand the literature and have a doctor who is willing to discuss all these questions with you in detail. The science is far from clear here. [/quote]

Unless it was a randomized study, where parents did not get to choose whether their kids took medication or not, I think it would be safe to say that the kids who did not take medication had less disabling symptoms than the ones that did. So if they ended up looking the same, that suggests that the medication did, in fact, make a difference.[/quote]

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