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Led by Søren Dalsgaard from Aarhus University in Denmark, the large nationwide  cohort study followed nearly 2 million individuals from the Danish national registers, including more than 32000 people with ADHD, from their first birthday to 2013 (a maximum of 32 years). The causes of premature death were assessed to compare individuals with and without ADHD. During follow-up, 107 individuals with ADHD died. People diagnosed with ADHD were about twice as likely to die prematurely as people without the disorder, even after adjusting for factors known to affect the risk of early death including age, sex, family history of psychiatric disorders, maternal and paternal age, and parental education. This increased risk of premature death  in people with ADHD was mainly driven by deaths from unnatural causes, more than half of which were caused by accidents (42 deaths among 79 people for whom the cause of death was known). The risk of dying prematurely increased with age at diagno...

The findings, just reported in the journal  Development and Psychopathology , add to a growing body of evidence that environmental factors, including maltreatment in childhood, can have a significant bearing on the negative psychosocial outcomes of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. "While ADHD is clearly a heritable and biologically based disorder, and can be treated with medications, it is very important for clinicians and treatment providers to pay close attention to the trauma experiences of individuals, particularly women, with ADHD," said Maya Guendelman, a Ph.D. student in psychology at UC Berkeley, and lead author of the study. The results also raise the question of whether children with ADHD are more vulnerable to maltreatment due to family stress. A neurodevelopmental disorder, ADHD is estimated to afflict at least 6 million children and teenagers in the United States and is characterized by poor concentration, distractibility, hyperactivity, impulsive...

t has long been known that TS, which emerges in childhood and is characterized by troublesome motor and vocal tics, is often accompanied by other disorders, especially attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In many patients these "comorbid" conditions cause more distress and disability for patients than TS tics themselves. But the size and rigor of the new study, conducted by an international group of researchers known as the Tourette Syndrome Association International Consortium for Genetics (TSAICG) and published in the February 11, 2015 online edition of JAMA Psychiatry, provides the most comprehensive and reliable picture of TS comorbidities to date, said Carol A. Mathews, MD, professor of psychiatry at UCSF and co-senior author of the new report. "This is the biggest data set of its kind that I know of," Mathews said. "We've interviewed thousands of people and collected a huge wealth of clinical d...

Senior psychology major Kari Benson has seen that firsthand with fellow students. As a sophomore, she had started working with associate professor Kate Flory in the University of South Carolina's Parenting and Family Research Center, studying social impairment in children with ADHD. Friends would ask her what she was up to, and once word got around that she was doing ADHD research, a few acquaintances that didn't know her very well started making requests. "People would ask me if I could get them Adderall or Ritalin," Benson says. "I realized that this was a pretty prevalent issue on campus, and I wanted to see what I could do about it." She set out to analyze collegiate misuse of stimulant ADHD drugs, earning a grant as a Magellan Scholar from the Office of Undergraduate Research to help put together a survey of Carolina students. To familiarize herself with previous work in the area, she prepared a literature review that Flory thought merited publ...

There is growing 'lifestyle use' of cognitive-enhancing drugs -- such as methylphenidate (marketed as Ritalin) and modafinil (marketed as Provigil) -- by healthy individuals to improve concentration, memory, and other aspects of cognitive performance. But very little is known about the long-term effects of this non-medical use, say the authors. "We simply do not know enough about how many healthy people are using cognitive-enhancing drugs, in what ways and why," explains Professor Sahakian. What evidence there is suggests that healthy individuals use cognitive-enhancing drugs to gain a competitive edge at school, university, or work, and for maintaining attention and performance when sleep derived or jet lagged. Most research has focused on student use in the USA with estimates varying between 5% and 35%. Worryingly, say the authors, this might only be the tip of the iceberg and is unlikely to be representative of usage in professional or older populations. A w...

In Utah, for example, an analysis of information from two national health surveys correlated with the average state elevation of 6,100 feet showed that the rate of diagnosed ADHD cases is about 50 percent of states at sea level. In Salt Lake City, whose elevation is about 4,300 feet, diagnosed ADHD prevalence is approximately 38 percent less than at sea level. One potential reason for the decreased  rate of ADHD, University of Utah researchers believe, is higher levels of dopamine produced as a reaction to hypobaric hypoxia -- a condition caused when people breathe air with less oxygen at higher elevations. Decreased dopamine levels are associated with ADHD so when levels of the hormone increase with elevation, the risk for getting the disorder diminishes. There are other potential reasons for the disparities in the rates of the disorder, such as regional inconsistencies in diagnosing ADHD. The study findings, published in the Journal of Attention Disorders online, have impor...