May 19, 2021
Myth: ADHD is an American disorder.
Those who claim ADHD is an American disorder believe that ADHD is due to the pressures of living in a fast-paced, competitive American society. Some argue that if we lived in a simpler world, ADHD would not exist.
Fact: ADHD occurs throughout the world.
Wherever scientists have searched for ADHD, they have found it. They have done this by going to different countries, and speaking to people in the community to diagnose them with or without ADHD. These studies show that ADHD occurs throughout the world and that the percentage of people having ADHD does not differ between the United States and the rest of the world. Examples of where ADHD has been found include Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, The Netherlands, and Ukraine. ADHD is not an American disorder.
Myth: A child who sits still to watch TV or play video games cannot have ADHD.
Many parents are puzzled that their child can sit still to watch TV or play video games for hours, but that same child cannot sit still for dinner or stay at their desk for long to do homework. Are these children faking ADHD symptoms to get out of homework?
Fact: ADHD does not necessarily interfere with playing video games or watching TV.
Because children cannot turn their ADHD on and off to suit their needs, it does seem odd that a child who is typically hyperactive and inattentive can sit for hours playing a video game. But this ability of ADHD children fits in very well with scientific facts about ADHD. First, you probably understand the effects of rewards and punishment on behavior. If your behavior is rewarded, you are likely to do it again. If it is punished, you will avoid that behavior in the future. Rewards that have the strongest effect on our behavior are large and will occur soon. For example, consider these two choices:
a) if you listen to a boring one-hour lecture, I will pay you $100 immediately after the lecture
b) if you listen to a boring one-hour lecture, I will pay you $110 one year after the lecture
Choice (a) is more appealing than choice (b). Most people will not think it is worthwhile to wait one year for $10. We say they have 'discounted' the $10 to $0.
Now consider the choices:
c) if you listen to a boring one-hour lecture, I will pay you $100 immediately after the lecture
d) if you listen to a boring one-hour lecture, I will pay you $2,000 one year after the lecture
Choice (d) is more appealing than choice (c). Most people will wait one year for$2,000. It is obvious here is that if I want the best chance of having you watch a lecture, I should offer you a large sum of money immediately after the lecture. What is not so obvious is that people vary a great deal in the degree to which they are affected by rewards that are either small or distant in the future. For some people, getting $2,000in one year is almost like getting nothing at all. We say that such people are not sensitive to distant rewards.
What does this have to do with ADHD and video games? Well, people with ADHD are usually not very sensitive to weak or distant rewards. To affect the behavior of a person with ADHD, the reward needs to be immediate and fairly large. When a child with ADHD sits down to do homework, the potential reward is getting a good grade on their report card, but they won't receive that grade for weeks or months, so it is very distant. Thus, it is not surprising that the possibility of that reward cannot control the child's behavior. In contrast, video games are created so that players are rewarded very frequently by winning points or completing one of the many levels one must pass to finally complete the game. Because playing well is also rewarded by friends, the video game rewards are strong and immediate, which makes it easy for people with ADHD to sit still and play for long periods.
Myth: ADHD disappears in adulthood.
Until the 1990s, it was commonly believed that children grew out of ADHD. The reason for this is not clear. Some theories about ADHD suggested that ADHD children had a lag in brain development, and that they would make up for that lag during adolescence. So ADHD was seen as a delay in brain development that could be overcome. The idea that children routinely recovered from ADHD was so strong that many insurance companies would not pay for the ADHD treatment of adults.
Fact: In the majority of cases, ADHD persists into adulthood.
This myth about ADHD has been proven wrong by studies that diagnosed ADHD in children and then examined it many years later than in adults. These studies showed that, although there was some recovery from ADHD, about two-thirds of cases persisted into adulthood. The studies also taught us that ADHD symptoms tend to change with age. The extreme and disruptive hyperactivity of many ADHD children gets somewhat better by adulthood, as do some symptoms of impulsivity. In contrast, inattentive symptoms do not decrease much with age.
Myth: People with ADHD cannot do well in school or succeed in life.
This myth is based on several facts: 1) ADHD affects many aspects of life; 2) ADHD impairs thinking and behavior and 3) for most people, ADHD is a lifelong disorder. Altogether, doesn't this mean that people with ADHD won't succeed in life?
Fact: People with ADHD can succeed and live productive lives.
There are two reasons why people with ADHD can succeed in life. The first is obvious. Although treatments for ADHD are not perfect, they can eliminate many of the obstacles that would otherwise make it difficult for ADHD patients to do well in school or on the job. But, more importantly, having ADHD is only one of many facts about a person's life. Some ADHD people have other skills or traits that help them compensate for their ADHD. For example, if you have a high level of intelligence, an engaging personality, or excellent athletic skills, you can do well despite having ADHD. Consider Michael Phelps, who broke so many Olympic swimming records. He was diagnosed with ADHD at age 9 and took Ritalin to help his hyperactivity. James Carville has ADHD, but he completed law school and helped Bill Clinton become President of the United States. Cammi Granato's ADHD did not stop her from becoming captain of the United States Olympic ice hockey team, and Ty Pennington's ADHD did not stop him from becoming a star on TV.
Myth: ADHD does not affect highly intelligent people
The mistake behind this myth is that it assumes that being very intelligent protects people from having ADHD. It's true that if you are highly intelligent, you can use that intelligence to compensate for some ADHD' effects, but does high intelligence completely protect a person from ADHD?
Fact: People with ADHD can succeed and live productive lives.
When my colleagues and I studied this question, we found clear evidence that high intelligence does not completely protect people from ADHD. Like people who don't have ADHD, having high intelligence will help Alderpeople do better than ADHD people who are not smart. But when we compared highly intelligent Alderpeople with highly intelligent non-ADHD people, we found that the highly intelligent ADHD people had many of the impairing problems that are known to be associated with ADHD. For details about these problems, see Complications of ADHD. In another study, we compared ADHD adults who had received straight A grades in high school, with non-ADHD people who had achieved the same grades. Despite their good grades, these ADHD adults were not doing as well in their jobs and not earning as much income as the non-ADHD adults. And ADHD also has an impact at every level of education. As you can see from the figure, even for people with college degrees, having ADHD lowers your chances of being employed.
Faraone, S. V., Sergeant, J.,Gillberg, C. &Biederman, J. (2003). The Worldwide Prevalence of ADHD: Is it an American condition? World Psychiatry2, 104-113.Polanczyk, G., de Lima, M. S., Horta, B. L., Biederman, J. &Rohde, L. A. (2007). The Worldwide Prevalence of ADHD: a systematic Review and Meta-regression Analysis. Am J Psychiatry164,942-8.
Scheres, A., Lee, A. &Sumiya,M. (2008). Temporal reward discounting and ADHD: task and symptom-specific effects. J Neurol Transm115, 221-6.
Faraone, S., Biederman, J. &Mick, E. (2006). the Dependent Decline Of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Aneta-Analysis Of Follow-Up Studies. Psychological Medicine36,159-165.
Precocious puberty (PP) is defined as the onset of secondary sex characteristics before age 8 in girls or age 9 in boys.
Because it accelerates skeletal maturation by prematurely shutting down the cartilage growth plate at the tip of long bones, it tends to lead to shorter height in adulthood. It is also known to place an additional psychological burden on children, especially girls. Girls are four to 38 times more likely to develop PP than boys.
Taiwan has a single-payer national health insurance system, called National Health Insurance, that encompasses 99.6% of the island’s population. The Ministry of Health and Welfare uses it to maintain the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD), enabling researchers to conduct nationwide population studies.
Using this database, a Taiwanese study team investigated the relationship between ADHD and precocious puberty among children and adolescents (under 18). And because methylphenidate (MPH) is the only psychostimulant approved for the treatment of ADHD in Taiwan, the team also explored the effect of MPH on this relationship.
Most diagnoses of ADHD in the NHIRD are made by board-certified psychiatrists, enhancing diagnostic validity.
Of the more than 3.3 million persons born in Taiwan between 1997 and 2001, 186,681 were diagnosed with ADHD. Of these, 122,302 were prescribed MPH.
After adjusting for sex, low-income households, and neuropsychiatric comorbidities, children diagnosed with ADHD were twice as likely to be diagnosed with PP. This held equally true for boys and girls.
However, children diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed MPH were more than a third less likely to subsequently be diagnosed with PP than those diagnosed with ADHD but not prescribed MPH.
For girls with ADHD, who without an MPH prescription were nine times more likely than boys with ADHD to be diagnosed with PP, an MPH prescription reduced that ratio to five times more likely than boys with ADHD and prescribed MPH.
That suggests a strong protective effect of MPH.
The team concluded, “Our study found that children with ADHD were at a greater risk of PP, and girls with ADHD were a particularly vulnerable group. … MPH appeared to be protective against PP in patients with ADHD, especially in girls. However, these preliminary results need further validation.”
Maternal infections and inflammatory responses during pregnancy have been proposed as risk factors for neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD.
Taiwan has a single-payer health insurance system that covers virtually the entirety of its population. Its Ministry of Health and Welfare maintains the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD), with detailed information on outpatient services, hospitalizations, and medical treatment for nearly 99% of all residents.
A Taiwanese study team used NHIRD to examine to examine the relationship between maternal hospitalization for infection, and early childhood infection, and subsequent ADHD in offspring. The study cohort originated with all 3,260,879 individuals born between 2001 and 2018.
The team excluded births from foreign mothers, still births, births with congenital defects, low birth weights, abnormally late births, twins, triplets, and other multiple births, culminating in a final population cohort of 2,885,662 live-born single infants across 1,893,171 families, and 1,864,660 individuals with full siblings from 872,169 families comprising the full sibling cohort.
Study participants were followed until diagnosis of a neurodevelopmental disorder, their death, or the end of 2021.
After adjusting for sex, birth year, paternal and maternal ages, birthweight, birth season, parity, delivery method, 1 minute APGAR score (evaluating baby’s appearance, pulse, grimace, activity and respiration at birth), gestational age, pregnancy and delivery complications, parental history of neurodevelopmental disorders, maternal asthma and diabetes, urbanization level of the residential area, and family’s insurance amount, offspring of mothers hospitalized for infections had 14% greater odds of being subsequently diagnosed with ADHD.
However, in the full sibling cohort of over 1.8 million, this association vanished. That held true for each of the three trimesters of pregnancy. It also held true for bacterial infections. Surprisingly, offspring of mothers hospitalized for viral infections were 24% less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than their siblings not exposed to maternal viral infection. Because of that, they also had a 6% lower risk overall.
After the same adjustments, early childhood infection was associated with 16% greater odds of being diagnosed with ADHD.
Nevertheless, in the full sibling cohort of over 1.8 million, this association again vanished. That held true overall, as well as separately for childhood infections in months 1-6 and months 7-12. The association vanished altogether both for bacterial infections as well as for viral infections.
The authors concluded, “the results of this nationwide birth cohort study with population and sibling analyses suggest that the association between maternal infection during pregnancy and offspring neurodevelopmental risk is largely due to familial confounding factors.”
Most previous studies of suicide and self-harm risk among persons with ADHD have focused on adolescents and adults. They’ve also tended to be cross-sectional, analyzing data from a population at a specific point in time.
An Australian study team took a different approach, conducting a before-and-after study through the birth cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), comprising 5,107 children who have been followed up every two years since birth.
The diagnosis of ADHD was based on parents reporting that their child had received a diagnosis of ADHD at or before age ten.
Suicide and self-harm were defined as children’s self-report at age 14 of any thought or attempt of suicide and self-harm respectively over the past year.
The team adjusted for the following confounders: socioeconomic status, birth weight, ADHD medication history, maternal education level, maternal age at birth, experience in bullying victimization at age 12, and depression score based on Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (SMFQ).
Of the 5,107 participants, 3,696 had all the valid data required for analysis and were included in the final cohort. Of these, 3.6% were diagnosed with ADHD by age 10.
With diagnosis of ADHD at age 10 and all other factors held constant:
Both depression and exposure to bullying were statistically significant mediators for the relationship. Nevertheless, depression and exposure to bullying each accounted for well under 10% of the overall effect.
Neither socioeconomic status nor maternal factors had any significant mediating effect on outcomes.
Conclusion:
The authors concluded, “This study provides compelling evidence that children diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 10 years face significantly elevated risks of experiencing suicidal thoughts, planning, or attempts, as well as self-harm, by the age of 14 years, which underscores the critical importance of recognizing and addressing these heightened risks in children with ADHD.”
While factors like depression and bullying contribute, ADHD itself remains a key risk factor. Early intervention and strong mental health support are crucial to protecting these children’s well-being.
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