ADHD Drugs Do Not Boost Kids' Grades

The Wall Street Journal headline: "ADHD Drugs Do Not Boost Kids' Grades," and they're just devastated out there.  They just can't figure out how all of these drugs used by parents and teachers to tame little boy after little boy is not improving their grades.  That's right.  Four million kids are on ADD drugs, four million.... 

Anyway, this is how the story begins.  "It's no longer shocking to hear of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder -- and others simply facing a big test -- taking ADHD medicine to boost their performance in school. But new studies point to a problem: There's little evidence that the drugs actually improve academic outcomes. Stimulants used to treat ADHD like Ritalin and Adderall --" Let me ask you a question.  I know you're all familiar with drug testing in professional sports.  Does it give you pause when you learn that one of the most used drugs in professional sports, the NFL, is Adderall, and that your kid is on it, and that the league bans its use? 

Second, Ritalin.  Some players, because they believe what's been said about ADHD and Ritalin and focus, we're talking about just versions of amphetamines here, all to combat what, in the old days, was just normalcy. 

~Rush Limbaugh

Here's an excerpt from  the article Limbaugh was referring to today from The Wall Street Journal:

It's no longer shocking to hear of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—and others simply facing a big test—taking ADHD medicine to boost their performance in school. But new studies point to a problem: There's little evidence that the drugs actually improve academic outcomes.

A June study looked at medication usage and educational outcomes of nearly 4,000 students in Quebec over an average of 11 years and found that boys who took ADHD drugs actually performed worse in school than those with a similar number of symptoms who didn't. Girls taking the medicine reported more emotional problems, according to a working paper published on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit economics research firm.

End quote.

Its not surprising. They also found Prozac as ineffective as a placebo:

The Guardian reported: Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists:Analysis of unseen trials and other data concludes it is no better than placebo

The review breaks new ground because Kirsch and his colleagues have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants.

They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

The pattern they saw from the trial results of fluoxetine (Prozac), paroxetine (Seroxat), venlafaxine (Effexor) and nefazodone (Serzone) was consistent. "Using complete data sets (including unpublished data) and a substantially larger data set of this type than has been previously reported, we find the overall effect of new-generation antidepressant medication is below recommended criteria for clinical significance," they write.

Two more frequently prescribed antidepressants were omitted from the study because scientists were unable to obtain all the data.

Concerns have been raised in recent years about the side-effects of this class of antidepressant. Evidence that they could prompt some young people to consider suicide led to a warning to doctors not to prescribe them for the under-18s - with the exception of Prozac, which was considered more effective than the rest.

~Read more here

Also the Daily Mail reported about it here.

They also have no idea how these drugs affect the brain, especially long term. The Telegraph reported that they are just acknowledging the brain damage likely caused 30 years after the introduction of tranquilizers to the mass market.