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    J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2007 Aug;46(8):1015-27.

    Effects of stimulant medication on growth rates across 3 years in the MTA follow-up.

    Swanson JM, Elliott GR, Greenhill LL, Wigal T, Arnold LE, Vitiello B, Hechtman L, Epstein JN, Pelham WE, Abikoff HB, Newcorn JH, Molina BS, Hinshaw SP, Wells KC, Hoza B, Jensen PS, Gibbons RD, Hur K, Stehli A, Davies M, March JS, Conners CK, Caron M, Volkow ND.

    UCI Child Development Center, 19722 MacArthur Blvd., Irvine, CA 92612, USA. jmswanso@uci.edu

    OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the hypothesis of stimulant medication effect on physical growth in the follow-up phase of the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With ADHD. METHOD: Naturalistic subgroups were established based on patterns of treatment with stimulant medication at baseline, 14-, 24-, and 36-month assessments: not medicated (n = 65), newly medicated (n = 88), consistently medicated (n = 70), and inconsistently medicated (n = 147). Analysis of variance was used to evaluate effects of subgroup and assessment time on measures of relative size (z scores) obtained from growth norms. RESULTS: The subgroup x assessment time interaction was significant for z height (p <.005) and z weight (p <.0001), due primarily to divergence of the newly medicated and the not medicated subgroups. These initially stimulant-naïve subgroups had z scores significantly >0 at baseline. The newly medicated subgroup showed decreases in relative size that reached asymptotes by the 36-month assessment, when this group showed average growth of 2.0 cm and 2.7 kg less than the not medicated subgroup, which showed slight increases in relative size. CONCLUSIONS: Stimulant-naïve school-age children with Combined type attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder were, as a group, larger than expected from norms before treatment but show stimulant-related decreases in growth rates after initiation of treatment, which appeared to reach asymptotes within 3 years without evidence of growth rebound.

    PMID: 17667480 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

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