4 weeks Ago By Luis Prada
Back before college kids were snorting lines of Adderall, those same kids were on Ritalin, the ADHD drug of choice for hyperactive 90s kids. According to new research, it seems that Ritalin might have a bit of a downside and that it permanently shrinks a child down by an average of 1.6 inches.
The New York Times Magazine published a fascinating (and lengthy!) feature on ADHD treatments, whether doctors are over-diagnosing the problem, and whether modern medicines/approaches to treating ADHD are even right to begin with. It spends some time discussing the Multimodal Treatment Of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, which we can mercifully shorten to the MTA study.Is Ritalin Bad for Children?Back in the ‘90s, when scientists kicked off the MTA Study, they tracked 579 ADHD-diagnosed kids across a medley of treatment combos—Ritalin, therapy, both, or neither.
After three years, researchers noticed something weird: the Ritalin kids weren’t hitting the same growth spurts as their non-medicated peers. No biggie, they thought. Surely, puberty will fix this.
By age 25, the short Ritalin kids were still short. That “height gap” never closed. Turns out that Ritalin might suppress growth for good.
On top of making kids shorter, the scientists also found that Ritalin’s benefits fizzled out after about a year. Academic performance didn’t improve significantly after the first year on Ritalin, and attention span didn’t improve a whole lot in that time either. Academic performance? Not significantly better.
Long-term attention improvement? Negligible.A 2017 follow-up confirmed that the height stunting was still there in adulthood, and a separate review of 18 Ritalin studies agreed. The authors of that review determined that the drug’s benefits far outweighed its possible ability to stunt growth.
As for why Ritalin stunts growth, researchers aren’t quite sure, but they theorize that it might have something to do with how Ritalin can suppress appetites, which means kids aren’t getting the well-rounded nutrition necessary to grow big and tall.The post ADHD Drugs Might Shrink Your Kid appeared first on VICE..
