Children taking ADHD stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall and Concerta are five times more likely to suffer sudden, unexplained death than children who are not taking such drugs according to a new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and funded by the FDA and the National Institute of Mental Health. Despite these new findings, however, FDA regulators are urging parents to keep their children on these dangerous drugs.
Ritalin, Adderall and Concerta already carry FDA warnings about risks of heart attack and stroke in children with underlying heart conditions, but this was the first study to investigate whether or not they posed a similar risk to healthy children without those problems.
The study, which compares information about 564 children in the United States who died suddenly and inexplicably between 1985 and 1996.
For every child who died suddenly and inexplicably, the researchers then found another child closely matched in terms of age, sex and other variables who died in a traffic accident.
The researchers found that 10 children in the group that suffered sudden, unexplained death had been taking stimulant drugs, whereas only two children in the group were killed in traffic accidents were taking such medications. That means that the children taking the ADHD drugs were five times more likely to die than those not taking the drugs.
However, FDA officials said that given the seriousness of ADHD and the rarity of sudden death — which strikes fewer than 1 in 10,000 children — the benefits of the drugs outweigh their risks. Agency officials urged parents to discuss concerns with doctors rather than deciding on their own to discontinue a child’s medication. I say its not worth the risk!
According to government researchers, about 2.5 million U.S. children currently take drugs for ADHD. At a rate of 1 in 10,000 children, approximately 250 will die a sudden horrible death from these stimulant drugs. If one of those children happened to be your child, no benefit could outweigh the risk. In the not too distant past, even one death was not acceptable. Why do we now allow the FDA and the Pharmaceutical industry to have such power? Why do we allow them to downplay the statistics to the point that they call 250 deaths a rarity?
There can only be one of two answers – greed or ignorance. Which do you think it is? Sales of these ADHD drugs topped $4.8 billion dollars in the US last year for the most popular brands including Ritalin from Novartis, Adderall from Shire Pharmaceutical and Concerta from Johnson & Johnson, according to the health care analysis firm IMS Health.
