Giving ADHD Drugs to Kids Has a Long-Term Side Effect That Might Change Their Minds About Taking It

Image by Getty / Futurism Studies As wildly overinvolved parents shell out to give their kids growth hormones to make them taller, some research suggests that putting them on drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have the opposite effect. As the New York Times reports, the scientists behind the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or MTA Study for short, weren't exactly looking for physiological changes in their subjects: a cohort of 579 kids with ADHD, some of whom were given methyphenidate (better known as Ritalin), counseling, a mix of the two, or neither. Beginning in 1994, researchers across the country began tracking outcomes of children who were seven to ten years old at the start of the study. After 36 months, the researchers realized something odd: that the children who had been given the popular stimulant seemed to be growing more slowly than their non-medicated counterparts. The researchers presumed, per their re ... Read full article.