ADHD takes a toll well into adulthood
Only 37.5 percent of the children we contacted as adults were free of these really worrisome outcomes ," says lead investigator William Barbaresi, M.D., of Boston Children's Hospital, who started the study when he was at Mayo. "That's a sobering statistic that speaks to the need to greatly improve the long-term treatment of children with ADHD and provide a mechanism for treating them as adults." The study is unique because it followed a large group of ADHD patients from childhood to adulthood, says Slavica Katusic, M.D., an epidemiologist and Mayo Clinic's lead researcher on the study. ADHD is the most common neuro-developmental disorder of childhood, affecting about 7 percent of all children and three times as many boys as girls. Most prior follow-up studies of ADHD have been small and focused on the severe end of the spectrum -- such as boys referred to pediatric psychiatric treatment facilities -- rather than a cross-section of the ADHD population. ...