ADHD Drugs Don't Help Children Long Term

[Hannah Bell]

March 27, 2009

Stimulant drugs like Ritalin that are used to treat ADHD don't improve children's symptoms long term, according to new research published online in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. That may come as a surprise to parents, but ADHD researchers have been arguing for the past 10 years over the findings of the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD. Called the MTA study, it is the largest study conducted to compare the benefits of medication to behavioral interventions.

This latest report from the MTA study tracked 485 children for eight years and found those still taking stimulant medication fared no better in the reduction of symptoms such as inattention and hyperactivity or in social functioning than those who hadn't. Most of the children who had taken medication for the first 14 months were no longer taking it. This, the researchers wrote, raises "questions about whether medication treatment beyond two years continues to be beneficial or needed at all." Earlier reports found that children taking stimulants alone or combined with behavioral treatment did better in the first year than children who got no special care or who got behavioral treatment alone.

There's more: Stimulant drugs stunt children's growth, according to another report in the journal that analyzes MTA data. Children who never took stimulants were three quarters of an inch taller and 6 pounds heavier on average than children who took medication for three years. The children don't make up for that later on.

http://www.usnews.com/health/blogs/on-parenting/2009/3/27/adhd-drugs-dont-help-children-long-term


...All of this made me wonder if Peter Jensen, who seems determined to continue to support the use of drugs to treat ADHD, might have ties to pharmaceutical companies. It took me only a few minutes to discover that he has received funding or grants from: UCB-Pharma, Cephalon, Novartis, McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals, and Janssen Pharmaceutica.

I found confirmation of these ties here. Novartis and UCB-Pharma are manufacturers of ADHD drugs (Ritalin or methylphenidate), and Cephalon makes Provigil, which they attempted to promote as an ADHD drug for years until the FDA rejected it.

http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2009/03/parents-adhd-drugs-dont-work.html.



Novelty effect

The novelty effect, in the context of Human Performance, is the tendency for performance to initially improve when new technology is instituted, not because of any actual improvement in learning or achievement, but in response to increased interest in the new technology.


Hawthorne effect

The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied,<1><2> not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.

- an increase in worker productivity produced by the psychological stimulus of being singled out and made to feel important.