Do ADHD Drugs up Risk for Cardiac Deaths in Kids?
[ad#250×250]In short, we don’t know. Yesterday, a study was released online in the American Journal of Psychiatry which demonstrated an association between stimulant medications used to treat ADHD, and sudden death in kids. The headlines generated by the release of this study are downright scary, but as parents, the question is, how worried do we need to be? First of all, lets look at what the study did, and what it actually found. Researchers performed something called a case-control study, meaning that they found cases where healthy kids between the ages 7-19 suffered sudden deaths, and compared them to a control group of kids in the same age range who had been killed in auto accidents during the same time period. Then, they looked at medical examiner records, toxicology findings and/or death certificates to determine if these subjects had taken stimulant medications immediately prior to death. The study included 564 children who had died sudden deaths, and 564 controls. Researchers
