Litigation

Head Injury and ADHD

By Michael Kaplen

There has always been a reported connection between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and head injury.  Researchers have set out to determine if the head injury is the cause of the development of ADHD.

In a paper published in the British Medical Journal this week, the researchers found that it is the trait of excessive risk taking shared by children with ADHD and those who have sustained a head injury and not the head injury itself that is the cause.

For the study, the research group collected data on 62,088 children who were registered in a British health improvement network database. The researchers compared the children with head injuries to two other groups: children with a burn/scald injury before the age of 2, and all the other non-injured children.

"We wanted to make sure that if we saw a relationship between head injury and ADHD, it wasn't just that kids with early injuries were showing behavioral traits that would make them more likely to be diagnosed versus the head injury itself," said the studies lead author. 

The researchers found that children with early head injury did have a 90 percent higher incidence of ADHD diagnosis before they were 10, compared with children in the general population. However, children with a scalding injury also had a higher risk of being diagnosed with ADHD, 70 percent to be exact. "Therefore, the head injury did not appear to cause the ADHD," they concluded.  They think that this may mean that some very young children are already showing behavioral traits that are the hallmarks of ADHD.

Full post as published by Brain Injury News and Information on November 14, 2008 (boomark / email).