World News Korner

Increase in children diagnosed with attention deficit disorders closely tied to schools that focus on test scores. In other words "No Child Left Behind" has resulted in fewer children left un-medicated.

The authors of a new book entitled "The ADHD Explosion" have made a rather startling discovery:

Using Centers for Disease Control surveys, Hinshaw and Sheffler found that when rates of ADHD diagnoses are broken down by state, it turns out that there are dramatic discrepancies. Based on the most recent survey, from 2011, a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada.

And these states aren’t just outliers. The five states that have the highest rate of diagnoses — Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana and North Carolina — are all over 10 percent of school age children. The five states with the lowest percent diagnosed — Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and California — are all under 5 percent. The disparity is even greater for kids prescribed ADHD medication. The same five states are at the top of the list, all of them with over 8 percent of kids getting medication. The states at the bottom of the list for medication — Nevada, Hawaii, California, Alaska and New Jersey — are all under 3.1 percent.

The authors set out to look for factors that could account for those sharp discrepancies.

“We thought it might have to do with the supply of providers — how many pediatricians or child psychiatrists in a given region — or the ways states supplement Medicaid,” explains Hinshaw. “It might have to do with advertising. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most kids first get noticed for ADHD in a classroom setting. So we wondered, are there policies about schooling that might be relevant?”

What the team found was that high rates of ADHD diagnoses correlated closely with state laws that penalize schools when students fail. Nationally, this approach to education was enacted into law in 2001 with No Child Left Behind, which makes funding contingent on the number of students who pass standardized tests. In more recent years, similar testing-based strategies have been championed by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee. But many states passed these accountability laws as early as the 1980s, and within a few years of passage, ADHD diagnoses started going up in those states, the authors found, especially for kids near the poverty line.

ADHD diagnoses of public school students within 200 percent of the federal poverty level jumped 59 percent after accountability legislation passed, Hinshaw reports, compared with less than 10 percent for middle- and high-income children. They saw no comparable trend in private schools, which are not subject to legislation like this.

I absolutely believe this to be true. In fact I have seen it in action.

Focus on the test, and stress placed on teachers to make sure each child can finish the test within the time allotted, have resulted in these medical shortcuts which will see children with perfectly normal attention spans sent to pediatricians with teacher recommendations to be evaluated for ADHD or ADD.

And believe me many pediatricians have no problem simply prescribing the medications, even for kids who fall outside of the spectrum. What I don't think many realize, and I have seen many examples of this, is that children who take medications their entire lives have no problem turning to Oxycontin or PCP, or other mood altering drugs as teenagers or young adults.

In fact many of the prescription medications for ADHD have a very high street value, and kids have been known to shop them around in exchange for beer or pot money, or for something quite a bit stronger.

Just another way that George Bush has negatively impacted a generation of young Americans.

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