Early School Attendance May Lead to ADHD Diagnosis.

While I do not want to add to the belief and outcry that AD/HD is over or mis-diagnosed, I found this recent article very interesting and the findings are very much worth consideration. The findings of this study are very interesting. The authors used a government healthcare database (Canada) that included about 96% of the population in the provinces they investigated. To be more sure that their findings were not due to the increased popularity of the AD/HD diagnosis, they analyzed the data of children born between 1997 and 2008. They found that children who were born closer to the cuttoff date for school (December 31 in Canada) were 30% (boys) and 70% (girls) more likely to be diagnosed with AD/HD than those born in January (oldest children in the classroom). While they found that the incidence of AD/HD diagnosis did increase over the decade they analyzed (1997-2008), the "Relative Risk of Diagnosis" did NOT differ statistically significantly (a fancy way of saying that the slight differences that did take place did not matter) from year to year.


So what is the take home message? Younger children are less developmentally mature than older children in the classroom. The youngest children will act in ways that resemble AD/HD. This is something that should be accounted for in an AD/HD evaluation if it is suspected that your child has AD/HD. For more information on what a good evaluation consists of, click here, for a blog post about it.

While this study was performed in Canada, the authors site various studies done in the United States that have concluded the same.

What are your thoughts?

For those interested, here is a link to the original article.