About 3 percent to 7 percent of school-aged children have ADHD and the disorder is more common in boys than in girls. Symptoms can include the inability to focus attention on a particular task for very long, hyperactivity or fidgeting. Moreover, children and teens with ADHD are generally unorganized and impulsive. Sometimes children with ADHD have poor grades in school and are slow to develop social skills. Many children and teens with ADHD also have co-existing disorders including anxiety and depression.

“The mean age of kids presenting with ADHD is 13 and I am now seeing more teenagers than children in my practice,” says Stephen Grcevich, MD, a faculty member in the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

“There are two peaks,” explains Grcevich, also the president and founder of The Family Center by the Falls in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. “A group of kids come in at age 5, 6, or 7 who are impulsive, aggressive, disruptive and defiant, but what happens with the smarter kids with ADHD is that they are not hyperactive because they can compensate for ADHD on the basis of their intelligence alone until 6th grade,” he says.

Somewhere between grades 7 to 9, “kids get to the point where they have homework from different teachers and projects that require that they parcel out their time and they just hit a wall and have a sudden, significant drop in grades,” he says. “They have the intelligence to do the work, but not the organizational skills to manage the workload. They become quickly overwhelmed,” he says.

Enter ADDERALL XR. A stimulant, ADDERALL XR is taken once daily. In addition to the new teen indication, this drug is also approved for treatment of ADHD in children aged 6 to 12 and in adults aged 18 and older. Stimulants affect how the brain controls impulses and regulates behavior and attention by influencing the availability of certain brain chemicals.

In the study that led to the newest indication for teens, ADDERALL XR was more effective than placebo and was safe and well tolerated. Common side effects included loss of appetite, insomnia, abdominal pain and weight loss. Moreover, 63% of the study researchers said that the teens were “much” or “very much” improved with ADDERALL XR, compared with 23% who said the same for the teens given dummy pills.

While there have been some concerns over the potential for abuse of stimulants, “kids with ADHD treated with stimulants are 50% less likely to develop a problem than those who don’t receive pharmacotherapy,” Grcevich says. In fact, ”appropriate medication for ADHD plays an important protective role in mitigating against substance abuse,” he says.

“Most children will continue to have significant functional impairment into adolescence. However, there is a safe treatment available to relieve the functional impairment that teens experience, and which can impact on the ability to achieve potential academically and socially,“ Grcevich says.

Parents seem to agree. In a recent survey by the National Mental Health Association, families of teens with ADHD said they strongly believed that treating the disorder improved their teen’s school and home life.

And it also helps them stay safe when they are behind the wheel. Research out of the Washington Neuropsychological Institute has shown that treatment with ADDERALL XR improved simulated driving performance in people aged 19 to 25. Young adults with ADHD are known to receive double the number of traffic violations and have more license suspensions than their peers who do not have this common disorder.

Most often, stimulant medications are used to treat ADHD, but other non-stimulant types are available including Atomoxetine (Strattera), antihypertensive drugs (which are designed to treat high blood pressure, but can also help control aggressive and impulsive behaviors in some) and antidepressants. Talk to your doctor to find out which is right for you or your teen.

© 2005 HealthNewsDigest.com