The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has published a systematic review on the diagnosis and treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adolescents. The researchers sought to update two previously published AHRQ systematic evidence reviews by comparing approaches in the diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of pediatric patients with ADHD (birth to 17 years old).

“[W]hat I always intuitively did, from early on, was to avoid any kind of dependence/commitment...any kind of commitment, even a club membership, where you need to attend meetings five times a year, whatever, even that would have felt restricting." The above statement is how one adult in a recently published study described attempts to cope with symptoms of undiagnosed ADHD.

A new study at Columbia University Irving Medical Center challenges the popular notion that psychiatric medications are overprescribed in children and adolescents in the US. Published in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, researchers compared prescribing rates with prevalence rates for the most common psychiatric disorders in children.

Sitting still is something people with ADHD are famous for not doing...Not Sitting StillSo why can’t we sit still? The short answer is that we have an aversion to sitting still for the same reason we have an aversion to other boring tasks: it’s understimulating."

The way parents interact with their kids is said to affect how well these kids perform in school, especially for kids with ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This was according to studies conducted by a group of researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine.

Offspring of a parent with diagnosed type 1 diabetes, particularly a mother with the disease, have an increased risk for ADHD compared with the other children, study data show.

Early antihistamine use in children with atopic dermatitis may be related to attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder symptoms, researchers report in the journal Allergy. The study, reported in November, suggests that even in the absence of a clinical ADHD diagnosis, pediatric atopic dermatitis patients have a higher tendency than children without atopic dermatitis to develop ADHD symptoms.