Excerpt from: Newswise (click for full article)
Nine out of 10 young children with moderate to severe attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) continue to experience serious, often severe symptoms and impairment long after their original diagnoses and, in many cases, despite treatment, according to a federally funded multi-center study led by investigators at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
The study, published online Feb. 11 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, is the largest long-term analysis to date of preschoolers with ADHD, the investigators say, and sheds much-needed light on the natural course of a condition that is being diagnosed at an increasingly earlier age.
“ADHD is becoming a more common diagnosis in early childhood, so understanding how the disorder progresses in this age group is critical,” says lead investigator Mark Riddle, M.D., a pediatric psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. “We found that ADHD in preschoolers is a chronic and rather persistent condition, one that requires better long-term behavioral and pharmacological treatments than we currently have.”
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