Many of you know one of my favorite things to do in my free time (uh, hah!) is to go to PubMed and look up medical studies on whatever catches my fancy of the moment.  Lately, I have been trying to understand even more about ADD/ADHD.  Even though I have treated many children with this challenge from a physical therapy perspective, even though I have had adult friends diagnosed with this condition, I really wanted to understand what was going on in the medical research world about it all.

Here are some studies that caught my eye, and I wanted to share them with you all. 

Here is the first one, entitled “The Delinquency Outcomes of Boys with ADHD with and Without Comorbidity”.

This study was done out of the Center for Children and Families at Florida International University.  It essentially examined the “the association between childhood ADHD and juvenile delinquency by examining data from the Pittsburgh ADHD Longitudinal Study (PALS), a follow-up study of individuals diagnosed with ADHD in childhood (ages 5-12) and re-contacted in adolescence and young adulthood for yearly follow-up .”  There were 288 participants with childhood ADHD and 209 control subjects.  The study’s findings suggested that “ boys with ADHD-only and ADHD + ODD also appear at a higher risk for later offending.” 

The second study I found was  entitled “Bipolar disorder co-morbidity in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” and came out of the neuropsychiatry department of La Scarpetta Hospital in Rome, Italy.  The study of 173 participants plus 100 healthy control subjects found that children with ADHD present a higher risk for developing a “superimposed bipolar disorder.”

The third study I found was this one:  “Self-Regulation of Emotion, Functional Impairment, and Comorbidity Among Children With ADHD” out of the University of North Caroline Greensboro.  According to the authors of this study, this study “investigated the role of self-regulation of emotion in relation to functional impairment and comorbidity among children with and without ADD/HD.”  This study  found that nearly half of the children “affected by AD/HD displayed significantly elevated levels of emotional lability versus 15% of those without this disorder.”  The authors stated that these findings “lent support to the notion that deficits in the self-regulation of emotion are evident in a substantial number of children with AD/HD and that these deficits play an important role in determining functional impairment and comorbidity outcomes.”

So, whilst these studies are dire-sounding, I  think the medical community is researching some important links between ADD/ADHD and the challenges these children face in social interaction and in dealing with emotions and mental health.  These could be things that parents of children with ADD/ADHD would want to be aware of in order to discuss them further with their health care team.

But, I certainly couldn’t just this topic with these studies without remarking on any possible hope……In my next post, I want to share some of the studies I found regarding more natural treatments of ADD/ADHD. 

Do any of you out there have children that have been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD?  Would you like to share any comments in the comment boxes below?

Hold those children close and love them,

Carrie