September 28, 2023
Youths with disabilities face varying degrees of social exclusion and mental, physical, and sexual violence.
A Danish researcher used the country's extensive national registers to explore reported sexual crimes against youths across the entire population. Of 679,683 youths born from 1984to 1994 and between the ages of seven and eighteen, 8,039 (1.2 percent) were victims of at least one reported sex crime.
The sexual offenses in question included rape, sexual assault, sexual exploitation, incest, and indecent exposure. Sexual assault encompassed both intercourse/penetration without consent or engaged in with a youth not old enough to consent (statutory rape).
The study examined numerous disabilities, including ADHD, which was the most common one. It also performed a regression analysis to tease out other covariants, such as parental violence, parental inpatient mental illness, parental suicidal behavior or alcohol abuse, parental long-term unemployment, family separation, and children in public care outside the family.
In the raw data, youths with ADHD were 3.7 times more likely to be a victim of sexual crimes than normally developing youths. That was roughly equal to the odds for youths with an autism spectrum disorder or mental retardation, but considerably higher than for blindness, stuttering, dyslexia, and epilepsy (all roughly twice as likely to be victims of such crimes), and even higher than for the loss of hearing, brain injury, or speech or physical disabilities.
Looking at covariate, family separation, having a teenage mother, or being in public care almost doubled the risk of being a victim of sexual crimes. Parental violence or parental substance abuse increased the risk by 40 percent, and parental unemployment for over 21 weeks increased the risk by 30 percent. Girls were nine times more likely to be victimized than boys. Living in a disadvantaged neighborhood made no difference, and living in immigrant neighborhoods actually reduced the odds of being victimized by about 30 percent.
After adjusting for other risk factors, youths with ADHD were still almost twice as likely to be victims of reported sex crimes than normally developing youths. All other youths with disabilities registered significantly lower levels of risk after adjusting for other risk factors: for those who were blind, 60 percent higher risk; for those with autism, hearing loss, or epilepsy, 40 percent higher risk. Communicative disabilities - speech disability, stuttering, and dyslexia - actually turned out to have protective effects.
This points to a need to be particularly vigilant for signs of sexual abuse among youths with ADHD.
Mogens Nygaard Christoffersen, "Sexual Crime Against School children With Disabilities: A Nationwide Prospective Birth Cohort Study," Journal of interpersonal violence (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520934442.
There has been consistent evidence of an association between ADHD and subjectively reported sleep problems even in patients not medicated for the disorder. There have also been studies using wrist-worn actigraphy (a wrist watch-like device that measures gross motor activity) and sleep lab-based polysomnography that measure objective sleep parameters.
What has been missing are large population-based cohort studies to explore the prevalence rates of different sleep disorders and medical prescriptions in ADHD.
Methods Used:
Sweden has a single-payer health insurance system and a series of national population registers that track virtually its entire population. Using the Swedish Total Population Register, a local research team created a cohort of all 6,470,658 persons born between 1945 and 2008. They linked this to the Swedish National Patient Register, which includes inpatient hospitalizations from 1975 to 2013, and outpatient specialist diagnoses from 2001 to 2013, to identify diagnoses of sleep disorders. They also linked to the Prescribed Drug Register, covering 2005 to 2013, to identify prescriptions for sleep medications.
Summary of Findings:
Overall, persons with ADHD were eight times more likely to be diagnosed with any sleep disorder relative to normally developing peers. Broken down by age, adolescents with ADHD were 16 times more likely to receive such diagnoses, young adults (18-30) twelve times more likely, children and mid-age adults (31-45) eight times more likely, and older adults six times more likely.
Broken down by specific sleep disorder diagnoses, relative to normally developing peers, persons with ADHD were:
As for sleep medication, relative to normally developing peers, persons with ADHD were:
Conclusion:
The team concluded, “Our findings also suggest that greater clinical attention should be directed towards addressing sleep problems in individuals with ADHD. This entails implementing proactive measures through sleep education programmes and providing both pharmacological and non-pharmacological approaches such as cognitive behavioural therapy and parental sleep training.”
Attention is a critical determinant of academic achievement, influencing domains such as language, literacy, and mathematics. To explore whether physical activity can improve attention in children with ADHD, an international team conducted a meta-analysis of peer-reviewed studies. The goal was to evaluate the impact of various physical activity regimens on attention-related outcomes in this population.
The researchers performed a comprehensive search of the medical literature to identify studies examining the effects of physical activity on attention in schoolchildren with ADHD. They included 10 studies with a total of 474 participants in their meta-analysis. The studies evaluated two main types of physical activity:
Additionally, they examined variations based on the frequency, duration, and type of control groups used in the studies. To assess consistency, they also analyzed heterogeneity (variability of outcomes) and checked for potential publication bias.
Key findings from the meta-analysis include:
The authors concluded that mentally engaging exercise is more effective than aerobic exercise in improving attention problems in schoolchildren with ADHD. Furthermore, higher frequency and longer duration of physical activity do not necessarily yield better outcomes.
This research underscores the importance of tailoring physical activity interventions to emphasize cognitive engagement over intensity or duration. By refining strategies, educators and parents can better support children with ADHD in achieving academic success. But take note: given the results from controlled studies, it seems clear that if there is a positive effect of exercise, it is very small so should not replace standard treatments for ADHD.
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Previous studies have examined how stimulant medications affect the brain in controlled settings, but less is known about their impact in real-world conditions, where children may not always take their medication consistently or may combine it with other treatments. A new study leverages data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study to explore how real-world stimulant use impacts brain connectivity and ADHD symptoms over two years.
Changes in Brain Connectivity Researchers used brain imaging data from the ABCD study to examine the functional connectivity—communication between brain areas—of six regions within the striatum, a brain area involved in motivation and movement control. They focused on how stimulant use influenced connectivity between the striatum and other networks involved in executive functioning and visual-motor control.
The study found that stimulant exposure was linked to reduced connectivity between key striatal areas (such as the caudate and putamen) and large brain networks, including the frontoparietal and visual networks. These changes were more pronounced in children taking stimulants compared to those who were not medicated, as well as compared to typically developing children. Importantly, this reduction in connectivity seemed to regulate certain brain networks that are typically altered in children with ADHD.
Symptom Improvement In addition to brain changes, 14% of children taking stimulants experienced a significant reduction in ADHD symptoms over the two-year period. These children showed the strongest connectivity reductions between the right putamen and the visual network, suggesting that stimulant-induced connectivity changes may contribute to improvements in visual attentional control, which is a common challenge for children with ADHD.
Why This Matters This study is one of the first to examine how stimulant use in real-world conditions affects brain networks in children with ADHD over time. The findings suggest that stimulants may help normalize certain connectivity patterns associated with ADHD, particularly in networks related to attention and control. These insights could help clinicians better understand the potential long-term effects of stimulant treatment and guide personalized approaches to ADHD management.
Conclusion Stimulant medications appear to alter striatal-cortical connectivity in children with ADHD, with some changes linked to symptom improvement. This research highlights the potential for stimulant medications to impact brain networks in ways that support attention and control, highlighting the importance of understanding how real-world medication use influences ADHD treatment outcomes.
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