Posted on 07/11/2006 3:24:49 PM PDT by blam
Feminine Side of ADHD: Attention disorder has lasting impact on girls
Bruce Bower
Although hyperactive behavior often abates during the teen years for girls with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, many struggle with serious academic, emotional, and social problems related to that condition, a 5-year study finds.
Compared with teenage girls who had no psychiatric disorder, those with ADHD had difficulties that included delinquency, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, poor mathematics and reading achievement, rejection by peers, and lack of planning skills, reports a team led by psychologist Stephen P. Hinshaw of the University of California, Berkeley.
"ADHD in girls is likely to yield continuing problems in adolescence, even though hyperactive symptoms may recede," Hinshaw says.
The new findings appear in the June Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
In 1997, Hinshaw's team organized the first of three yearly summer camps for 6- to 12-year-old girls, including individuals already diagnosed with ADHD. The project focused on 140 girls with ADHD and 88 girls with no psychiatric disorder, all of whom completed one of the 5-week programs. Staff monitored each girl's daily behavior and administered a battery of tests without knowing who had an ADHD diagnosis.
Girls with ADHD showed marked problems in academic subjects, in peer relationships, and in planning and time management. Girls' ADHD symptoms involved disorganized and unfocused behavior more than the disruptive, impulsive acts often observed in boys with this condition.
The latest findings, collected from those same girls 5 years later, come from interviews and questionnaires administered at home to 126 girls with ADHD and 81 girls with no disorder. The researchers also obtained reports on each girl's behavior from her parents and teachers.
Of girls diagnosed with ADHD as 6-to-12-year-olds, 39, or nearly a third, no longer displayed the condition as teens. The 87 adolescent girls who continued to deal with ADHD grappled with learning problems, psychiatric symptoms, and social difficulties far beyond any observed in teen girls never diagnosed with ADHD, the researchers say. Only about half of the girls who originally displayed symptoms of hyperactivity and impulsiveness did so as teenagers.
The new data mirror earlier reports that hyperactivity in boys with ADHD often recedes during adolescence as problems with inattention grow worse, remarks psychiatrist Benedetto Vitiello of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. "ADHD is a developmental condition that changes over time in similar ways in boys and girls," Vitiello says.
In the new study, no specific form of treatment was associated with shedding ADHD between childhood and adolescence.
Treatment effects are difficult to tease out in samples such as this, Hinshaw says. Girls with severe, hard-to-treat ADHD symptoms tend to seek treatment, as do those with mild symptoms who are highly motivated to get help or whose parents are treatment savvy.
As many as 7 million children and teenagers in the United States have been diagnosed at some time in their lives with ADHD. The condition occurs about three times as often in boys as in girls.
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That's because most boys who are diagnosed with ADHD are simply acting like boys and not girls. Teachers today don't know how to handle boys (maybe because they are mostly women).
Fake. Disease.
It is just a way to control boys in class without having to do actual work.
"World To End Today:Women and Minorities Hit Hardest"
Girls are more than half the population. Why should it be so significant that this *affects girls* and more than it affecting boys. News flash. *Children are at risk* DUH!
My sister,a very hard working,productive,middle class gal was recently diagnosed as having it at one of Harvard Medical School's largest teaching hospitals.
And,no,she's not gonna apply for SSDI or anything like that.
Tell that to my 19 year old daughter who has fought with ADHD and depression her whole life. Nothing fake about it. Nothing.
Teachers apparently want more referral fees.
"Research" that is set up to find predetermined results is not science it is fraud. Why do they even call it social science? What hubris. The Physics and Chemistry departments must laugh and laugh at these wannabes who pretend to be scientists. There's no such thing as soft science. If research doesn't result in good hard repeatable results then it is fraud pure and simple.
I'm amazed that anyone buys any of the silly stuff that comes from of the social science wingnuts. I mean, this is Oprah kind of stuff, not real science. None of these "studies" ever survives an independent peer review. What an insult to real scientists. Why don't real scientists publicly repudiate these pretenders?
A struggle is not a disease.
"Attention Disorder Has Lasting Impact On Girls"
'been saying that for years.
Thank God I am not growing up today.
Today, they would have slammed those drugs in me so fast it would have made my head spin.
I simply do not believe it is a real disorder. I think it is kids being kids. Do kids get hyperactive? You bet. Do kids get depressed? Absolutely. I just do not believe it is a real "disorder". I think it is an excuse to drug kids to keep them in line.
Just my opinion.
Yes of course it is a real condition, many people on here are ignorant and shallow and accept the talking points w/o having any real knowledge. maybe ADHD is overdiagnosed and over medicated but it is very real for many many people.
A teenage girl who is our babysitter and friend has ADHD. She seems quite intelligent but is doing very badly in school. I worry about her future.
By the way, how much are you paid for your medical expertise?
We ended up putting her in our local public school for many complicated reasons (one of which was her sister who at a very young age showed evidence of brilliance and I was honestly too afraid to teach her and possibly screw her up)
The schools have worked with us at times and not at others. She bonded with a few teachers who are, in my opinion, saints here on earth. There were a couple that were rotten. She's going to college this fall at a small, private school with a whole lot of support. I've never been this nervous and you can believe I'll do what I can from 4 hours away, but the time has come for her to be on her own. Tons of deep breaths and prayers--and my husband says a drink now and then won't hurt.
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