Posted on 07/11/2006 3:24:49 PM PDT by blam
Feminine Side of ADHD: Attention disorder has lasting impact on girls
Bruce Bower
Although hyperactive behavior often abates during the teen years for girls with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, many struggle with serious academic, emotional, and social problems related to that condition, a 5-year study finds.
Compared with teenage girls who had no psychiatric disorder, those with ADHD had difficulties that included delinquency, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, poor mathematics and reading achievement, rejection by peers, and lack of planning skills, reports a team led by psychologist Stephen P. Hinshaw of the University of California, Berkeley.
"ADHD in girls is likely to yield continuing problems in adolescence, even though hyperactive symptoms may recede," Hinshaw says.
The new findings appear in the June Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
In 1997, Hinshaw's team organized the first of three yearly summer camps for 6- to 12-year-old girls, including individuals already diagnosed with ADHD. The project focused on 140 girls with ADHD and 88 girls with no psychiatric disorder, all of whom completed one of the 5-week programs. Staff monitored each girl's daily behavior and administered a battery of tests without knowing who had an ADHD diagnosis.
Girls with ADHD showed marked problems in academic subjects, in peer relationships, and in planning and time management. Girls' ADHD symptoms involved disorganized and unfocused behavior more than the disruptive, impulsive acts often observed in boys with this condition.
The latest findings, collected from those same girls 5 years later, come from interviews and questionnaires administered at home to 126 girls with ADHD and 81 girls with no disorder. The researchers also obtained reports on each girl's behavior from her parents and teachers.
Of girls diagnosed with ADHD as 6-to-12-year-olds, 39, or nearly a third, no longer displayed the condition as teens. The 87 adolescent girls who continued to deal with ADHD grappled with learning problems, psychiatric symptoms, and social difficulties far beyond any observed in teen girls never diagnosed with ADHD, the researchers say. Only about half of the girls who originally displayed symptoms of hyperactivity and impulsiveness did so as teenagers.
The new data mirror earlier reports that hyperactivity in boys with ADHD often recedes during adolescence as problems with inattention grow worse, remarks psychiatrist Benedetto Vitiello of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. "ADHD is a developmental condition that changes over time in similar ways in boys and girls," Vitiello says.
In the new study, no specific form of treatment was associated with shedding ADHD between childhood and adolescence.
Treatment effects are difficult to tease out in samples such as this, Hinshaw says. Girls with severe, hard-to-treat ADHD symptoms tend to seek treatment, as do those with mild symptoms who are highly motivated to get help or whose parents are treatment savvy.
As many as 7 million children and teenagers in the United States have been diagnosed at some time in their lives with ADHD. The condition occurs about three times as often in boys as in girls.
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And your background in medical research (particularly at the Harvard level) allows you to make such a statement because.....
Sometimes meds just don't work and the only thing that helps is providing a stable family to work through problems and decisions.
My daughter watches less than 10 hours of TV a month and reads constantly. She has too much energy to sit and watch. But reading takes her mind to other places and soothes her.
Just some free advice....probably worth what you just paid for it :)
I agree.
The ignorant freepers will be attracted to this thread like flies telling us the lie that this is a made up disease. At least ADHD can be treated with medication. Ignorance can't be.
I may have the ADD disease but I try not to be ignorant
Disease#1 A pathological condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, genetic defect, or environmental stress, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs or symptoms.
#2 A condition or tendency, as of society, regarded as abnormal and harmful.
Thank you for sharing your experience. We all make the mistake of thinking we know the answers to things that don't concern us directly. There shouldn't be a "conservative" approach to an illness. Just a medical and human one.
1. She doesn't watch that much TV.
2. She seems very insightful, is a good organizer and works very hard but she clearly has some sort of learning disability. She has trouble reading books to my son and her spelling is incredibly bad.
3. I can remember kids in my elementary school who would clearly be classified as having ADHD today. This was over 40 years ago. There was not much TV to watch in my town. One of these kids was a big reader but had trouble paying attention or sitting still in school. His family did not own a TV.
4. Maybe too many people re being grouped together under the heading ADHD, but there clearly are kids who have problems focussing on schoolwork despite seeming otherwise intelligent. What is your solution for them?
5. I was hoping that I could give our babysitter some tips that would help her get into a good college. Now it seems like graduating from high school without getting pregnant might be a more realistic goal.
6. It's hard to offer help or academic suggestions to teen agers without seeming like their parents.
Bump for later.
Most women I've known have ADHD, they never paid much attention to what I had to say.
LMAO!
Since most people are willing to concede that we may develop diseases of the liver, kidneys, bone, eyes, stomach, skin, or immune system, why is it difficult to believe that there might be diseases of the brain? Why can you not concede that something could go wrong with the incredibly complex and delicate neurochemistry that regulates our behavior?
BS. I've had this mess all my life. Its like you mind doesn't hold on to it tracks for long. If school classes only lasted 15 minutes, I could have been a Rhodes Scholar. I've tried every discipline you can think of. If the subject matter isn't bang 'em up my mind goes out in left field somewhere. It like some one has a TV remote control pointed at you and they keep changing the channels. Its a bitch.
It may not be a disease in the clinical sense but is it a condition to be reckoned with.
I made it without "Meds" and with the help of my family, as you say.
Nowadays they just say "this is a chemical imbalance -- it is impossible to overcome by force of will."
Except in the extreme, your brain is subject to your internal discipline. That is the definition of responsibility.
But it does take people around you that make it IMPORTANT to excercise that discipline.
To choose between love and meds, I'll take the love. But I do have some compassion for those whose don't have love on the choice menu.
The even more amazing thing is that there was no such thing as "clinical depression" until it was labeled as such.
I'm not at all sure what you mean here. Do you mean that there was no one who fit the current description of clinical depression before it was formally defined as such?
That is exactly how a friend described it to me some years ago.........
The people on this thread stating there is no such thing as ADHD are being ridiculous. Of course the condition exists. It's always existed.
Only now, medical science has labeled it and is trying to deal with it.
The problem is that we're living in a period of time where it's being over-diagnosed by half-wit - and wannabe - doctors.
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