Originally published March 20 2012
Millions of young, simply immature children being misdiagnosed with ADHD
by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) The criteria for diagnosing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has become so broad and all-inclusive that millions of young children around the world who are simply just immature -- they are kids, after all -- are being branded as ill and in need of psychotropic medications. These are the conclusions that have been made in an 11-year study out of Canada that revealed a much higher rate of ADHD diagnoses among younger children compared to older children, which indicates a rampant epidemic of misdiagnoses.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia tracked ADHD diagnosis and medication rates among nearly one million students who were between the ages of six and 12 during the period of December 1, 1997, and November 30, 2008. With a cutoff date of December 31 for admission into school as a first-time kindergartner, children born before this date were compared to those born after it, who were required to wait an extra year to begin attending school.
The findings, which were published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal revealed that those who were born in December before the cutoff date were 39 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, and 48 percent more likely to be taking ADHD drugs like Ritalin, than children born after the December cutoff date. In other words, the youngest children in kindergarten were far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the older kids, which points to a simple maturity disparity rather than a disease.
"The relative maturity of children is affecting the diagnosis, so in other words, the lack of maturity in younger children is making them more likely to get the diagnosis, and we can interpret that as the fact that sometimes a lack maturity is being misinterpreted as symptoms of a neurobehavioral disorder of ADHD," said Richard Morrow, a health research analyst with UBC's Therapeutics Initiative and lead researcher to CBC News.
Both the study's large sample size and clearly disparate diagnosis rates between age groups indicates that potentially millions of perfectly normal kids are having their livelihoods, and their brains, robbed from them by being forced to take dangerous psychotropic and antipsychotic medications, many of which have been shown to cause cardiovascular problems, organ dysfunction, and brain damage (http://www.cchrint.org).
In fact, the entire concept of ADHD appears to be a fraud to begin with, as the very existence of this so-called disease is based on a lot of pseudoscience and not much actual evidence (http://www.naturalnews.com/020227.html).
Sources for this article include:
http://www.cbc.ca
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