According to the Haute Autorité de Santé, attention deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity (ADHD) affects around 2 million people in France. This neurodevelopmental disorder, the first signs of which generally appear before the age of 12, can have an impact on many aspects of daily life such as learning and social life. To combat this condition, medications (and more specifically, psychostimulants) can be prescribed, explains New Scientist.
Although these medications are effective in alleviating immediate symptoms, such as difficulty concentrating in class, few studies focus on their long-term effects. It is in this context that a team of scientists carried out extensive research with 150,000 people suffering from ADHD in Sweden.
The results, published in the scientific journal The BMJ, show that taking drugs to manage the disease has broader and more diverse beneficial effects: people who take them may have a lower risk of suicidal behavior, criminal convictions, drug addiction, accidental injuries and road accidents.
A treatment with unsuspected effects
To conduct this study, Samuele Cortese of the University of Southampton (UK), Zheng Chang of the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) and their colleagues used a method called “targeted trial emulation”. This involves analyzing large sets of observational data as if they came from a randomized clinical trial. To do this, the team analyzed documents from Swedish medical and legal files to compare people who were under treatment and those who were not.
Researchers found that people receiving treatment for ADHD were 25% less likely to be criminally convicted or have a drug or alcohol problem. “They were also 16% less likely to be involved in a road accident, 15% less likely to attempt suicide and 4% less likely to suffer accidental injuries”details the media.
“This information is important for governments to help policy makers understand the potential benefits of treatment for society as a whole, including in relation to mental health or crime,” concludes Adam Guastella, from the University of Sydney, Australia.
Recently, another study demonstrated a link between ADHD and hypersexuality. Another suggested that consuming too much Adderall (the medication prescribed to alleviate the symptoms of this disorder) increased the risk of experiencing a psychotic episode. Even today, knowledge about this disorder remains partial, and many gray areas remain regarding its mechanisms.
