Timothy Wilens, MD, discusses new research that clarifies whether ADHD medications have neurotoxic, neuroprotective, or neutral effects on the developing brain.
I’m dr. charles ray’s on i’m on the steering committee for the us side congress i’m here with dr. tim boylan from harvard expert on adhd talk to us a little bit about what we’re learning about the impact or non impact of medications we use to treat adhd on on the developing brain well that is a real scary question to a lot of people certainly a lot of parents
Are worried about it a number of practitioners have been concerned about that for years here we are giving kids 11 and 12 years of age stimulant medications hopefully if they need them through their adolescence and maybe far beyond and we now have a lot more information on that in fact it was a recent large meta-analysis that examined that issue turns out there’s
Almost 30 studies on this including structural studies how the brain the actual structure of the brain how the brain functions and then looking at the neuronal neuronal interactions the studies seem to be converging and finding the following number one that it’s the unmedicated adhd kids that has the most differences in their brain structure and function relative to
Controls when you medicate the adhd kids even over years they turn out to look more like non adhd kids so we actually think there’s almost a normalization not only in the function how the brain is working but also in the structure at the thickness of the brain so at the very least we know that these medicines aren’t neurotoxic we think that they’re not just neutral
But we actually think that their neural protective interesting and do you think that’s because the medicines themselves for doing something direct or do you think it’s because they’re allowing kids to have more normal sort of interactions with the world which then why are the brain more normally just well you know that’s a 64 million dollar question it really is
Now to that point again you know for years we were worried geez are these neuro toxic then we went to neutral now we have enough data to say that they’re actually not protected but why are they not protective and what about effects on on statch or blood pressure and you know peripheral physiologic dad also is of concern so start a little bit with stature there
Seems to be maybe a mild effect on weight and height that tends to be approximately two to three years where you see that effect but after that for whatever reason there’s an attenuation of that effect so that if you look at adults who’ve been medicated for most of their life they are basically indistinguishable from those who didn’t receive medications in terms
Of cardiovascular there been a lot of studies on that and two large studies one in children one in adults that were underwritten by the food and drug administration those studies show no cardiovascular effects of these medications on the development of new cardiovascular adverse events even in individuals who may have had pre-existing cardiovascular problems so
Again we’ve gone from a lot of worry around the cardiovascular concerns to a more neutrality round now having said that i want to be sure that people realize you still need to screen people to ensure that this individual is medically safe to receive a psychostimulant thank you so much dr. great information
Transcribed from video
Are ADHD Medications Neurotoxic or Neuroprotective? By Psych Congress Network
