Forbes summarizes research that appeared in Pediatrics:

Meds Help Kids With ADHD in Classroom
04.26.09, 08:00 PM EDT
Study finds they test higher than unmedicated peers in grade school

MONDAY, April 27 (HealthDay News) — Children who take medication to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do better in elementary school than those who don’t, a new study has found.

Of 594 children whose parents reported an ADHD diagnosis, those who took medication scored 2.9 points higher on standardized math tests and 5.4 points higher on reading tests than children with ADHD who were not taking medication.

Researchers used a nationally representative sample from the Childhood Longitudinal Study of children who entered kindergarten in 1998, and followed them through fifth grade.

The higher test scores were comparable with the progress expected during one-fifth of a school year for math and about one-third of a school year for reading, according to the study funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

“It’s one more important piece of evidence that states clearly that taking the medication isn’t just about parents or teachers feeling better about the child or thinking he or she is more compliant,” said study author Stephen P. Hinshaw, chair of the department of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. “On an objective, rigorously-designed standardized test of reading and math ability, we have evidence there are ‘real world’ gains in achievement.”

If prolonged use of ADHD drugs make children shorter and lighter, try to imagine what else they might be doing. And keep in mind that four times as many boys as girls suffer from attention disorder problems. This Washington Post story lays out the research.

The WPost today lays out the personal challenges of raising an ADHD child, which is likely to be a son, given that four times as many boys as girls suffer from attention deficit problems. The toll on a marriage can be considerable.

From the article (photo courtesy of the Post):

Couples who have a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are nearly twice as likely to divorce or separate as couples who do not have children with the psychiatric disorder, according to a definitive new study that is the first to explicitly explore the question. The reason appears simple: Having a child who is inattentive or hyperactive can be extremely stressful for caregivers and can exacerbate conflicts, tensions and arguments between parents.

The research topic is sensitive because it can be easily misinterpreted to mean that scientists are blaming kids for the marital woes of their parents; that may be one reason researchers have generally avoided the topic and limited their investigations to how parental conflicts affect children. But increasingly, the evidence suggests that the lines of influence run in both directions

Today, the NYTimes delivers a good article on more schools using stand-up desks. Given that at last four times as many boys as girls suffer from ADHD, wouldn’t the impact on the boy troubles merit at least a mention? Not here. I don’t want to step on a forthcoming commentary I wrote about why the boy troubles are considered a politically untouchable topic, so for now I’ll just offer up this article as more evidence of that phenomenon.

Here’s the last posting I wrote  on stand-up desks. 

That’s the title of this commentary in EducationNews.org:

It has been a high profile year for autism. A severely autistic Minnesota boy was banned from church.An autistic kindergartner in Florida was voted out of class. A mother and her autistic son were thrown off an American Airlines flight at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. And another mother and autistic toddler were kicked off an airplane in Houston reportedly because the boy was repeating ‘bye, bye plane’ during the safety speech …

Perhaps we are hearing more about autism in the news because there are more autistic children in America than ever before. The CDC’s most recent study estimates one out of every 150 children over the age of 8 is autistic or suffers from a related disorder. Today, 560 thousand Americans under the age of 21 have autism.T hat number is hundreds of thousands higher than just 30 years ago.

 Four times as many boys as girls suffer from autism, which is roughly the gender balance for ADHD as well. I suspect autism is not a big player in the boy troubles, but rather further evidence of the relative biological fragility of young boys. ADHD, especially the rampant overprescription of attention deficit drugs, strikes more as a symptom than a cause of the boy troubles. From my perspective, boys have always been more biologically fragile; therefore, that fragility can’t be the cause of the recent school declines among boys.

I’ll admit, though, that I have a minority opinion on those issues. To read a contrary view (that biological factors can account for the recent boy troubles), I recommend Dr. Leonard Sax’s new book, Boys Adrift.