NBC News (4/18, Lovelace) reports, “More students from middle school to high school are misusing” medications prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD), “amid an increasing number of children being diagnosed with the condition in the” US, research indicates. In fact, “at some schools, as many as one in four students reported misusing” AD/HD medications “in the previous year – meaning they used the medications without a” physician’s “prescription or for nonmedical reasons, according to the” findings published online April 18 in JAMA Network Open.
CNN (4/18, LaMotte) reports, “The study analyzed data collected between 2005 and 2020 by Monitoring the Future, a federal survey that has measured drug and alcohol use among secondary school students nationwide each year since 1975.” In this study’s data set, “questionnaires were given to more than 230,000 teens in eighth, 10th and 12th grades in a nationally representative sample of 3,284 secondary schools.” Study lead author Sean Esteban McCabe, director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, stated, “This study is a major wake-up call.”
Related Links:
— “Up to 1 in 4 students misuse ADHD drugs, study finds “Berkeley Lovelace Jr., NBC News, April 18, 2023