Certain things become trendy. Everyone’s wearing boxy jackets, and anyone cool is drinking Cosmos. Brooklyn itself has become a trend, hard as it is to imagine, and who doesn’t have an iPhone 5?
But in a trend much less desirable, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, seems to have become trendy, too. In just 9 years, from 2001 to 2010, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, the number of children diagnosed with ADHD has jumped 24%. And certain groups caught the trend even more than others. Non-Hispanic black girls were leaders, with a 90% increase in the diagnosis of ADHD during the last decade. Black children overall showed a 70% increase, with Hispanic children demonstrating a 60% relative increase, and white children bringing up the rear, with ‘only’ a 30% relative increase.
Clearly hundreds of thousands more children didn’t suddenly start having trouble paying attention, being easily distracted, fidgeting and squirming, and demonstrating profound disorganization in work habits.
What do you think? Is this ADHD a fad, a worrisome reality, or a wastebasket diagnosis? Take our poll below:
billgncs
January 24, 2013
when it gets a kid extra time on entrance exams for a hard to get seat in college, why not. Did you know NFL cornerbacks like to take and ADHD drug because it helps them concentrate better in games. Four game suspension for getting caught.
Carol Leynse Harpold, MS, AdEd, OTR/L, ATP
January 28, 2013
I also believe the more sedentary life style with electronic games, instant access to almost anything, reduction in routines and structure contribute significantly to attentional challenges. There is an amazing amount of things to become distracted by now a days!
My 2 cents.
Carol
DeeDee
February 7, 2013
I think kids aren’t getting adequate encouragement for the kind of activities that promote attention in neural development, and that’s probably due to sociocultural shifts over time. ADHD affects the parts of the brain implicated with balance, for example, and there’s evidence to suggest that training oneself with exercises that develop balance can also approve attention. It makes a lot of logical sense.
I’d be curious to know about changes in rates of adult diagnosis as well. The most advertised abuse of ADHD drugs is with college students (at least that I’ve seen) and they would generally fall into the adult category. But how about older folks yet?
candidaabrahamson
February 7, 2013
You make an excellent point about our failure as a society to properly promote certain brain development. In fact, according to a study conducted by the National Institutes of Health and published in Biological Psychiatry, using neuroimaging technology the researchers found that growth of the surface area of the cerebral cortex was delayed in children with ADHD. Although we don’t know a lot about how to address these delays yet, whatever we can do to stimulate growth is crucial.
In terms of the prevalence of the illness in adults, that is another fascinating question. The actual percentage of adults with ADHD has not been as frequently quantified as the percentage of children. Researcher Ronald Kessler, in his paper “The prevalence and correlates of adult ADHD in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication”, writes that “Attempts to estimate adult ADHD prevalence by extrapolating from childhood prevalence estimates linked with adult persistence estimates and direct estimation in small samples yield estimates in the range 1–6%.”
That’s a pretty big range, as you can see, so he went ahead and screened adults 18-44 years of age in a nationally representative survey. He and his co-researchers determined that the estimated prevalence of adult ADHD is 4.4%–and there doesn’t seem to have been a significant increase in that, as recent online publications from CBS News, the Huffington Post, and NBC News sticking to it.
Your point is fascinating—why are we finding such steadily increasing numbers of children with ADHD, while we’re not finding the same thing with adults? Why is that, and what can we do to keep children’s numbers from continually rising? Those are certainly points worth pondering!