How are ADHD drugs linked to sudden death?
Stimulant medications commonly prescribed to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are associated with an increased risk of sudden death, but those deaths are still rare, new research finds. Children and teens taking ADHD stimulant medications were seven times more likely to die suddenly than their peers, the study found. “What we found — to our surprise — is that even if you take out confounding factors, the association between stimulant use and sudden death was still significant,” said study author Madelyn Gould, a professor of clinical epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. “I’m confident the association is real and significant, but it’s very rare. I don’t want our findings to change prescribing patterns or for a parent to change their willingness to use stimulant medications if they’re called for, but physicians should monitor patients with any new medication you give a young person.” Results of the
Gould said the FDA approached her and her colleagues to try to assess the true prevalence of this problem. The researchers sifted through mortality data from 1985 through 1996, and found 564 cases of sudden death that occurred in children aged 7 to 19, and they compared them to 564 youths who had been killed as passengers in automobile accidents. After ruling out factors such as a history of known cardiac problems; known causes of death, such as asthma or an accidental death; and other conditions, such as sickle cell anemia or cerebral palsy, Gould and her colleagues found only 10 sudden, unexplained deaths in children taking stimulant medications. When they compared those 10 youths to age-matched controls who had died in car crashes, they found that the odds of sudden death were 7.4 times higher for children taking stimulant medications. “Stimulants do increase blood pressure, and there have been reports of them changing heart rates,” noted Gould. [http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20090615
