ADHD Diagnoses More Common in Youngest Kids in Class from Health.com

MONDAY, March 5, 2012 (Health.com) — Children who are the youngest in their class are more likely than their older classmates to be diagnosed and given medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—suggesting that immaturity may be part of the problem, not ADHD.

The finding is from a study of more than 900,000 Canadian children aged 6 to 12, and it dovetails with two U.S. studies that found the same thing in 2010.

In fact, the youngest boys were 30% more likely than their oldest classmates to get an ADHD diagnosis, and the youngest girls had a 70% greater chance, according to the study conducted by E. Jane Garland, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and colleagues.

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Anesthesia Exposure Linked To ADHD In Children from Medical News Today

A study by researchers at Mayo Clinic, Rochester Minn., and published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, reveals that children who have been under anesthesia many times when they are young have a greater risk of developing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). According to David Warner, M.D, a Mayo Clinic pediatric anesthesiologist, and researchers of this study, kids who have been exposed to anesthesia more than twice before the age of 3 are twice as likely to have ADHD than children who have not been exposed.

Warner and team began the study after other research suggested that anesthesia alters the brain of young animals. He said:

"Those studies piqued our interest. We were skeptical that the findings in animals would correlate with kids, but it appears that it does."

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