Should i medicate my adhd child

It appears JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Please enable JavaScript and refresh the page in order to complete this form. You wonder: What if… the medication harms my child? Here, families share the factors they considered when deciding to use ADHD medication.

Jump to Comments. Your Child's Brain on Meditation. Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Email Address. There are several different formulations of ADHD medications , designed to last from about 4 hours immediate release to 12 hours delayed release.

Any possible side effects , like loss of appetite or trouble sleeping, also stop when the child stops taking the medication. In over 50 years of using stimulant medications to counteract the symptoms of ADHD, and hundreds of studies, no negative effects of taking the medication over a period of years have been observed.

In recent years Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and her colleagues have done a number of imaging studies to better understand how ADHD, and the medication used to treat it, affect the brain. In they compared the brains of kids with ADHD before and after a year of treatment with stimulant medications. The studies showed an increase in the density of dopamine transporters—those molecules that take dopamine out of action—in the brain after treatment.

This suggests that the increase of dopamine stimulated by the medication may have prompted the brain to develop more dopamine transmitters to clear it away. How long that change might last is not clear, as the level of transporters in the brain fluctuates. But it could result, researchers note in their conclusion, in the medication not working as well as it had to reduce symptoms over the long run.

This is a subject of disagreement among clinicians and researchers. For many children the same dose adjusted for growth continues to work for many years. While the dose increases are modest, they are not just a result of children growing.

But over the 13 following months, many of the children had their dosage modified to continue to get the full benefit of the medication. The average increase per unit of body weight was These findings are interpreted differently by different researchers, some seeing evidence that kids developed tolerance for the medication, other not. Roy Boorady , MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute, says he often increases the dosage within the first several years of treating a child.

But after 15 or 16, I find that kids end up needing less, not more. The child gets more aware of what the medication does and might want more of that feeling. Hinshaw, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that sometimes after years of effective treatment, a patient with ADHD needs to switch to a medication based on a different stimulant, say from Concerta to Adderall, to maintain the effect.

A big concern about ADHD medication is the worry that kids who take them will be at higher risk for substance abuse when they are older. Join us as we reveal proven methods for turning chaos into calm. Article continues below Learn More. Worry not. Help is here! Find Out More. We've updated our policy regarding how we treat and protect data that is collected and used from our sites.

Our sites use cookies to improve your experience and enable certain functionality. Learn more. Manage consent. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.

Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent.

You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience. Necessary Necessary. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".

The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".

It does not store any personal data. Functional Functional. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.