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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G-d forbid. If only your Mom had the insight to dope you up with Ritalin or Adderal (unless you were Canadian; Adderal is BANNED up there)...she could have suppressed all of those inconvenient bouts of creativity. :-)
"But, to say that ADHD doesn't exist because it can't be measured--nope, try again."
LOL That is because they have RTSHII- Radio Talk Show Host Induced Ignorance.
Seriously though, many times diet changes can give relief. You may find that certain foods can make it worse. But diet isn't going to answer it 100%. Also, exercise. That is VERY hard for a person with depression, but I have never seen a case that exercise and diet did not help tremendously. But don't let anybody tell you it is a cure all. Just like Ritalin isn't a cure all. It takes a system of medication, diet, UNDERSTANDING, and exercise. Exercise is BIG. The person needs a good support structure. Telling them that FReeper Bob thinks it is all fake, is probably not going to help. The person cannot pull themselves out of it alone. And strange as it sounds, Depression and ADHD are directly related. Seems like they would be opposites, but they are not. One thing I know; once you get the right system in place and stick to it, there is a person in there that you will not believe. Intelligent, quick witted, energetic, great parent material.
Actually, there is only oooooone little thing that still tickles me in the back of my mind...I read once somewhere about there being a possible connection between the use of Pitocin at birth and ADHD later. But I cannot remember where I saw that. I mentioned it to one of the neurologists and they made note to look into that, but I never got back with them. When I was in labor with her, I received very high doses of Pitocin for failure to progress (I was in labor over 24 hours before a c-section). If that is the root cause, then I guess she was screwed from the get-go.
Adderall is banned in Canada? But not Ritalin?
Ping!
"(unless you were Canadian; Adderal is BANNED up there)"
Shows you what dumbass liberals will do when concentrated.
I believe that ADHD is a manufactured illness. Many behavioral problems need to be treated with structure and discipline. Some kids may be emotionally immature and need to be kept back a grade if they are unable to keep up in school.
Ahh, I looked it up. Adderall XR was temporarily banned in 3-05 after 12 deaths in the U.S. Of those 12, the Adderall was ruled out as contributory to death, with the exception of the 2 who overdosed. The ban on Adderall was lifted in 8-05 2005 and is now for sale with a black box warning.
I not meaning I wasn't interested. I wanted to achieve in the worst way. My achievement scores were in the to 95% and my teachers like to point that out every chance they got. Oyez, was labeled as lazy. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Review my posts that show what we went through with this "manufactured illness." It's as real as can be. My daughter did not have a behavior problem, we managed her diet and exercise and we home-schooled her. Once she did enter school, she ended up repeating a grade and to this day suffers greatly from ADHD, even with the support of her family, church and friends.
H***, if that's the case, I'm one also. (which I doubt seriously)
I think that having kids grow up on farms where they got a good chance to burn off all that excess energy milking cows, throwing around bails of hay, chopping wood, gardening, fishing, etc. would cure what's wrong with a lot of kids. Shoving a child that's meant to move ( all of them in fact) into an artificial environment where they are required to sit still for long periods of time INDOORS is a recipe for disaster. Small wonder there's problems.
I wonder what the incidence of kids diagnosed with ADD and ADHD is for farm kids or homeschooled kids?
"I believe that ADHD is a manufactured illness."
Completely false. This is really a great exercise in Logic and Critical Thinking. I am not flaming here, just trying to push a point. The rest of your statement is probably true in that kids have many different maturity levels. I do think it is VERY hard to diagnose a kid. BUT, people use that as a blanket statement that it is "fake". I think too many times it is diagnosed to early, and not medicated in conjunction with diet and exercise, but it is as real as real gets. Ritalin has got to be brutal on a 10 year old kid, when an adult gets the same dosage. No wonder they are zombies. But don't blame teachers. They need order in the class to be able to teach. If there is any failure, it is in the home. ADD has to be managed, and a parent has to look closely at the medicine diet and exercise to see which is making a difference. If mommy and daddy are busy making a career for themselves, it sure ain't the school's fault.
ROTFLOL! What an apt desription of normal teenage girlhood. Why is it that some people think kids should behave like miniture adults?
We have two teenagers in the house right now. One is ADD. And she is psycho in her own way. The other one is not ADD nor ADHD. She is PSYCHO. How's that? lol They think in different ways. One is brilliant. Shockingly so. The other is very, very intelligent. Teachers love her. (when she's not being a psycho teenager.) The ADD child is every teacher's nightmare because they know how smart she is, but they cannot capture her attention long enough to get her to focus on their nonsense projects. Hubby and I probably do not help her in this regard because we have the same disdain for the DUMB assignments that serve no purpose other than giving a teacher a pretty lesson plan. ADD child reads something, learns it, and moves on. Why waste her time further? There are other more exciting things to be learned. Teen 2 loves approval, so she's more apt to complete the silly projects. The more hormonal Teen 2 becomes, however, the less interested she is in pleasing her teachers/parents. But that's another story.
Ruled out by who, I wonder? I'll have to dig into that a bit more when I get a minute...
We found out by accident that artificial vanilla flavor sent my son off the walls. He would go from calm and compliant to a tornado in no time; he would be running non-stop, be flushed RED, and sweating like crazy, till his hair was soaked. Fortunately, since I was really careful with what they ate, it was pretty easy to figure it out but I could see where if he ate the stuff all the time, it would be very difficult to diagnose and no doubt he would have ended up on medication.
Worth repeating as it often takes on a mantle of secular religion :
"People put way too much faith in science."
I'm not trying to generalize in any way, this is one psychiatrist in one area in one state of the country. But, my daughter was home schooled when she was diagnosed. Take it for what it's worth I reckon.
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