ADHD linked to substance abuse risk
Analysis of data from two long-term studies of the impact of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on the development of psychiatric disorders in young adults confirms that ADHD alone significantly increases the risk of cigarette smoking and substance abuse in both boys and girls. The report from a team of Harvard researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) will appear in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) and has been released online. “Our study, which is one of the largest set of longitudinal studies of this issue to date, supports the association between ADHD and substance abuse found in several earlier studies and shows that the increased risk cannot be accounted for by coexisting factors such as other psychiatric disorders or family history of substance abuse,” says Timothy Wilens of the MGH Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit, who led the study. “Overall, study participants diagnosed with ADHD had a...