September is ADHD awareness month. Recently there have been many debates over the validity of diagnosis and contributing factors. In the latest information available in Missouri, nearly 8 percent of children between ages 4-17 were diagnosed with ADHD. This rate matches the national average. To put this number in perspective, it would be equal to 181 children in Linn County being diagnosed with ADHD. Broken down by gender, boys are about 3 times more likely than girls to have ADHD. Doctors and educators are doing everything they can to shed more light on this condition. “We have many things to look for in helping with potential ADHD students,” observes Gary Routledge, Director of The Linn County Health Department. “ The first person to get involved would be the teacher, who would have a conversation with the nurse and counselor, who in turn would meet with parents and help recommend a course of action involving a pediatrician.” Many symptoms are similar to medical and psychological conditions related to other disorders such as bi-polarism. Students will often have trouble staying focused and completing work. Their grades may drop and behavioral problems arise. Since these incidents are truly behavioral and not actually connected to a true disease with medical symptoms they are very tough to diagnose accurately.
Some of these symptoms are: hyperactivity, such as fidgeting, restlessness and having a hard time remaining seated; impulsivity, such as interruptions, difficulty waiting turns, and blurting out answers, and inattention, such as forgetfullness, distractions and poor concentration. Children with ADHD can sit quietly and work but not pay attention to what they’re doing.
One of the arguments for over-diagnosis includes this report to congress from a Congressional subcommittee. US Federal laws designed to identify and treat learning disabled children are serving as a powerful incentive for public schools to over-diagnose and medicate children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a panel has told an education subcommittee of Congress. Diagnosis of the disorder has jumped nearly five-fold recently. Currently, over 5 million children are diagnosed with the disorder. Some have attributed the rise to the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which steers money to school districts so that they can treat disabled children, since it can give schools an incentive to label children with ADHD. Others on the panel argued that a lack of mental health professionals in public schools, not IDEA, was to blame for the push to identify children with ADHD in schools. They said that overcrowded classrooms and a lack of training among teachers in dealing with behavior problems force the teachers to push for the calming effect of Ritalin and other drugs for hyperactive students. Often, the subject of the hearings shifted to a debate about whether ADHD is a true mental disorder, or whether the illness is simply an excuse for psychiatrists and drug companies to label unusual or rambunctious children to create a market for health services and medications.
Although there is a powerful incentive to increase the number of children with this diagnosis from the drug companies, other factors have contributed to this increase. There’s no evidence that vaccinations have anything to do with the increasing incidence of attention deficit disorder (ADD) or its cousin, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Both conditions have been diagnosed more frequently over the past two decades.
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