Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Misdiagnosis of ADHD in children?


My attention and curiosity heightened about the back and forth controversy about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, when i sat down to see a bigger picture and thought about how many children i know, evan in my own family, that are diagnosed and are medicated for this disorder. My nine year old niece is on medication for ADHD and i can recall so many instances when she has cried to to me that she doesn't like how her medicine makes her feel and she doesn't believe she needs it and also that people around her, mostly her older sister, uses her medicine as a sort of hurtful attack against her when she does something wrong. At the time, i just didn't understand enough about the disorder to understand exactly what the facts were.

Picture from saypeople.c
I started researching this topic and have found that the amount of children who are diagnosed for ADHD have massively increased from 4.4 million in 2002, to 5 million in 2010, according to a report by the Food and Drug Administration. In addition to this, i found many debates over if the diagnosis inclination is due to the rate of misdiagnosis which has been re-analyzed as sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep terrors, nightmares, bruxism and snoring. These disorders have some very identical symptoms as ADHD such as inattention, hyperactivity, and behavioral problems, that overlap and lead to misdiagnosis of the disorder according to principal investigator Susan Shur-Fen Gau, MD, PhD, associate professor at the College of Medicine and Public Health, National Taiwan University. In reference to this, it's clear to me that mental health professionals that are conducting tests to diagnose children's problems should be more thorough and first be able to question other possible factors causing the child's symptoms, like sleep disorders, before jumping the gun by concluding ADHD. 

Another questionable factor of ADHD diagnosis is that in a report from The American Academy of 
Pediatrics, it has been decided that children can now be diagnosed with ADHD at the young age of four. Controversies about whether four is too young of an age for diagnosis or not and if it can even be considered a valid one for the underdeveloped mind and behaviors of the child, have parents, teachers, and others questioning if their children can possibly just be experiencing more than normal levels of hyper-activeness but are just acting as children. There could be numerous other reasonable factors manipulating children's actions such as diet, sleep, exercise, home life, etc. that can be mediated without medication or a label that could make a child feel inferior to other children and siblings. Dr. Claudia Gold, a pediatrician and child mental health, expert is concerned that they will lead to more over diagnosis and over-medication in the preschool group. "Once there’s the question of ADHD rather than the question 'What’s going on for this child?' already you’ve narrowed your thinking," Dr. Claudia Gold said. "If you just look at what are the symptoms and what is the label, you miss a lot. But that is the standard of care, that’s how it works, which is how kids get all those labels," Dr. Claudia Gold also stated. I found an interesting blog article written by Dr. Jay S. Winston who was diagnosed as a child and was told he needed to be medicated on Ritalin which he objected to and in turn did not take the medication, but wrote about his perception and conclusion about over diagnosing and falsely diagnosing ADHD. Here is a piece from his blog: "Do I sound like a learning-disabled person? Or might it be that I was struggling with an educational system which itself has a severe disability in terms of understanding that some minds work differently than others and allowing those minds room to flower? Alas, from what I hear, things have only gotten worse since I left high school, and any hope for change has been positively knee-capped by “No Child Left Behind.” Can there be any doubt that, as reliance on standardized testing continues to grow, the attention deficit epidemic and resulting drugging of America's youth will as well?" This is just one persons ideas and side of the issue and there are many stories on the opposite side praising the doctors for medicating their children to fix them.



For more information on ADHD and what it is check out this website: www.tappmedical.com 


Work Cited:
  
American Academy of Sleep Medicine
"ADHD Linked To Sleep Problems In Adolescents" ScienceDaily
Retrieved August 1, 2012, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/05/090501090914.html
 (2009, May 6)

Susan Shur-Fen Gau, Huey-Ling Chiang. Sleep Problems and Disorders among Adolescents with Persistent and Subthreshold Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
May 1, 2009

Leslie Wade - CNN Medical Producer 
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/18/kids-taking-fewer-antibiotics-more-adhd-meds/?iref=allsearch
June 18th, 2012
07:45 AM ET

 Elizabeth Landau - CNN.com Health Writer/Producer
"Kids as young as 4 can have ADHD"
 http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/16/kids-as-young-as-4-can-have-adhd/?iref=allsearch
 October 16th, 2011
12:01 AM ET 


Paul J. Frick Department of Psychology, University of New Orleans
Persephanie Silverthorn Department of Psychology, University of New Orleans
"Psychopathology in Children"
 http://www.credoreference.com.hrt-proxy.libraries.vsc.edu/entry.do?id=10692092
© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc

essay by Dr. Jay S. Winston
My Mind on Drugs - an ADHD
ADHD and More
http://adhdandmore.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-mind-on-drugs-adhd-essay-by-dr-jay.html#links
February 12, 2009 
 
Image of table used from saypeople.com
 









1 comment:

  1. I think you constructed your blog on some solid facts found on accredible sources and this is extrememly important when trying to inform the public about the importance of educating yourself on this issue, appost to being biast and just believeing what you hear and do not really have a solid understanding if it is true or false information. I really believe this is an important issue to become aware of and become involved with because these children are going to be who are running our society some day and they are not just pawns that you can dope up to blind yourself from the true reality as to why they act the way they do. All in all, I think you did a great job presenting this issue to the class and found it very educational. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete