Drug treatment mitigates injury risk in ADHD children

By Lucy Piper, Senior medwireNews Reporter

Study findings show the importance of pharmacological treatment for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in ameliorating the increased risk of injuries associated with the condition.

Søren Dalsgaard (Aarhus University, Denmark) and colleagues report that treatment, primarily with psychostimulants, reduced the risk of injuries among 4557 children diagnosed with ADHD before 10 years of age by up to 43.5% and emergency ward visits by up to 45.7%, normalising the risk to levels seen in children without ADHD.

In a related comment, Jeffrey Newcorn (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York USA), says the research is “extremely important because accidental injury has long been considered a serious functional consequence of ADHD, which persists in various forms across the lifespan, though it has never been examined as extensively as it is here.”

Indeed, the research team found that the children with ADHD were significantly more likely to sustain an injury when aged 10 and 12 years than 705,563 children without the condition, at odds ratios of 1.29 and 1.30, respectively.

But for the 1457 children with ADHD who received drug treatment for their condition, for at least 6 months within a year before the age of 10 years, the prevalence of injury decreased from 19% at age 5 years to 14% at age 10 years. For the 3100 children with ADHD not receiving treatment the prevalence remained at about 17%.

The absolute differences in prevalence of injuries at ages 10, 11 and 12 years were 1.8, 1.7 and 3.2 percentage points lower for treated children, corresponding to significant reductions in prevalence of 31.5% by 10 years of age and 43.5% by 12 years of age.

The results were similar for emergency ward visits, with a significant 28.2% reduction in prevalence by 10 years of age and 45.7% by 12 years of age.

The researchers note in The Lancet Psychiatry that the protective effect of drug treatment against injuries remained robust in sensitivity analyses and in secondary analyses using a less conservative definition of drug treatment of at least one prescription for ADHD drugs before 10 years of age or 6 months of treatment in any given year before or after 10 years of age.

They conclude: “In light of this and our previous findings of accidents being the most common cause of death in individuals with ADHD, these results are of major public health importance.”

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