Furious Seasons

April 27, 2009

Study: ADHD Meds Produce Minor Gains In Test Scores

A new study is out in Pediatrics, asserting a positive association between kids taking ADHD meds and test scores. The study covered a five-year period and involved 594 children. What surprised me about the results is how small they are and how the New York Times characterized them on its Well blog.

Here are the study results:

"RESULTS. Medicated children had a mean mathematics score that was 2.9 points higher than the mean score of unmedicated peers with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Children who were medicated for a longer duration (at >2 waves) had a mean reading score that was 5.4 points higher than the mean score of unmedicated peers with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The medication-reading association was lower for children who had an individualized education program than for those without such educational accommodation.
"CONCLUSIONS. The finding of a positive association between medication use and standardized mathematics and reading test scores is important, given the high prevalence of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and its association with low academic achievement. The 2.9-point mathematics and 5.4-point reading score differences are comparable with score gains of 0.19 and 0.29 school years, respectively, but these gains are insufficient to eliminate the test-score gap between children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and those without the disorder. Long-term trials are needed to better understand the relationship between medication use and academic achievement."

Those are pretty minimal gains. But the NYT cast them thus:

"Children with attention deficit problems make bigger academic gains if they are taking stimulant medications compared to similar kids who aren’t receiving drug therapy, a new study shows."

That's just silly, especially since the reporter didn't add findings of other recent ADHD meds studies showing no gains with stimulant use after about two years. Here's the recent MTA study, for example. Interestingly, the new study claims that 7.8 percent of American children (4.4 million people) have ADHD, one of the larger prevalence claims I've seen for the disorder.

I sure don't envy parents of young children these days.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at April 27, 2009 12:27 PM

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Comments

Holy crap. Speaking as a former special ed teacher I can say those gains are so small as to be insignificant in terms of academics.

I didn't read the study, but did they control for the fact that reading tests given more than once a year are basically meaningless? And kids are tested to death these days.

Heck of a job, Brownie. Way to fry those little brains.

Posted by: Sherry at April 27, 2009 01:22 PM

utter bullshit...even if the gains were larger...why do we have to measure success and self-worth by academic achievement? Is it really worth being a good student at the cost of one's physical well-being??

I bet if you got those kids out in the woods hiking or running around a grassy park for an hour or two a day you'd get better results and healthier kids.

Posted by: Gianna at April 27, 2009 02:30 PM

Funny how taking kids out to a park and letting them run themselves out seems to work as well as ADHD meds.

Another issue is how schools are structured. I've suggested before that ADHD may not be an issue per se, but may in fact be an evolutionary response to living in a world in which we're all expected to process multiple sources of data from multiple media sources and somehow aggregate it into information. These days, I'm pretty sure I would have had an ADHD dx, but I grew up in the 1970s when teachers were perhaps more patient and schools were perhaps a bit more tolerant of different ways of learning.

In short, ADHD kids need constant stimuli from constant sources to keep them interested and focused. I'm not saying that they require special education in the sense that we normally use it, but rather classes which cater to their learning styles. I worry that we're effectively destroying a generation of kids who may represent the next evolutionary leap in humanity.

Posted by: Puckett at April 28, 2009 06:13 AM

I read an article recently about how giving children gum during a math test helped increase their scores 3% on average. That's better than ritalin, according to this study.

Posted by: molly_g at April 28, 2009 08:44 AM

molly,

i had read that about chewing gum about 5 or 6 years ago when one of my (gum chewing)daughters was in high school and taking college classes at the same time....i joked to keep the gum chewing going because her grades were high etc, and it remains a inside joke with us everytime i see her (now graduated college and has a great job)i give her a pack of gum.

interestingly, i had high math scores all through school and was an avid gum chewer back then too.

Posted by: Stephany at April 28, 2009 10:01 AM

Puckett,
"I'm not saying that they require special education in the sense that we normally use it, but rather classes which cater to their learning styles."

I agree. I always thought good special ed teaching was really just good teaching. We should be teaching in ways that reach multiple learning channels; all kids should have an IEP--a REAL IEP, not something ripped out of a cookbook.

If that kind of teaching is good for my special ed kids, why isn't it good for all kids? I had mainstream students who used to beg to have their study halls in my room or come for after school tutoring. What a wonderful way to destigmatize the "short bus kids" I thought? But I had to turn them away. Legalities, ya know.

Posted by: Sherry at April 28, 2009 10:28 AM