Apr 14, 12:43 PM EDT/ by Noor Al-Sibai
Giving ADHD Drugs to Kids Has a Long-Term Side Effect That Might Change Their Minds About Taking It
This one’s puzzling.
As wildly overinvolved parents shell out to give their kids growth hormones to make them taller, some research suggests that putting them on drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have the opposite effect.
As the New York Times reports, the scientists behind the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or MTA Study for short, weren’t exactly looking for physiological changes in their subjects: a cohort of 579 kids with ADHD, some of whom were given methyphenidate (better known as Ritalin), counseling, a mix of the two, or neither.
Beginning in 1994, researchers across the country began tracking outcomes of children who were seven to ten years old at the start of the study. After 36 months, the researchers realized something odd: that the children who had been given the popular stimulant seemed to be growing more slowly than their non-medicated counterparts.
The researchers presumed, per their retelling to the NYT, that this “height gap” would close in adolescence. When they followed up with them nine years after the study began, however, the medicated cohort was still 1.6 inches, on average, shorter than the kids who didn’t take Ritalin.
On a certain level, the concern is very shallow. There’s nothing wrong with being short, and if a drug can help with a myriad of other symptoms, maybe the risk is worth it.
But that’s not the only controversy around prescribing ADHD drugs to kids. The MTA study’s biggest takeaway was, troublingly, that the attention benefits of Ritalin seemed to cease after the first year, and that there were no apparent benefits to academic performance.
And even on top of that, the “height suppression” side effect was also enough to give the researchers pause.
In 2017, the MTA study scientists published a follow-up looking into the height gap that tracked the original cohort until they were 25. That height gap remained, per the study, into adulthood. And the findings countered bold academic assertions from just a few years prior claiming that any height suppression from ADHD meds in children would, as the researchers initially presumed, ultimately be undone in adolescence.
Years later, another group of scientists reviewed 18 childhood Ritalin studies and found, similarly to the MTA researchers, that the drug can indeed “result in reduction in height and weight” — though their opinion was that the size of the effect is negligible when compared to the purported benefits of these drugs.
To this day, researchers can’t agree as to whether or not stimulants can cause height suppression in children, primarily because the mechanism behind the demonstrated effect remains unknown.
Speaking to the website Health Central in 2022, childhood psychiatrist and MTA study co-author Laurence Greenhill of the University of California, San Francisco suggested that amphetamines’ well-known propensity to suppress appetite could be behind the growth differences.
“There could be some lack of nutrition going on that explains this,” Greenhill told the website.
“However, the kids aren’t malnourished,” he countered. “They’re just growing a little more slowly.”
If Ritalin or other stimulants help a child significantly, such a minor height disparity would be worthwhile. But with some of the original MTA study authors now questioning how effective these medical interventions really are, it may behoove parents to think before they put their kids on these pills.
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