Sometimes doctors have to try more than one to find the one that works best with the fewest side effects. One of the advantages of stimulant ADHD medications is that they take effect very quickly. As your son grows and matures, his medication may need to change, as well.
Think of each prescription refill as an opportunity to touch bases with your son and his doctor to reevaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of his medication and dosage. Other things that may help your son include:. Medication can never be a substitute for parental involvement. Medication considerations ADHD is a neurobiological brain problem that is very treatable. Or as people who truly want to help the child? Exploring existing attitudes and expectations as early as possible can help clinicians deliver their treatment recommendations effectively.
Medication or not, clinicians should remind parents of the myriad available ADHD treatments and interventions , which includes behavioral therapy, executive function coaches, support at school and home, and maintaining healthy habits. The stimulants should not be used to manage hyperactivity.
They are used to improve attention. The hyperactivity control is a frequent benefit, but not the target. A reduction of the dose is the next step. Monitoring attention and hyperactivity with a standardized instrument like a Vanderbilt from home and teacher and also other outside activity like sports, scouts, church is very important. You must be logged in to post a comment. It appears JavaScript is disabled in your browser.
Please enable JavaScript and refresh the page in order to complete this form. By Roberto Olivardia, Ph. Verified Updated on September 22, Putting it All Together: Helping Parents Weigh the Decision Though we hear all of the above concerns frequently, parents also worry that choosing not to medicate means their child will do poorly in school, fail to regulate emotions and impulsivity, grow to resent them, or face judgement from others.
Jump to Comments. Your Child's Brain on Meditation. When to Consider Medical Supports for Autism. Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Email Address. There is a small subset of children who react this way, and it usually happens right away, as soon as they start taking the medication, and goes away immediately when they stop taking it.
The effects of stimulant medications start and stop quickly because these medications are metabolized quickly. They do not stay in the body for an extended period of time. There are several different formulations of ADHD medications , designed to last from about 4 hours immediate release to 12 hours delayed release.
Any possible side effects , like loss of appetite or trouble sleeping, also stop when the child stops taking the medication. In over 50 years of using stimulant medications to counteract the symptoms of ADHD, and hundreds of studies, no negative effects of taking the medication over a period of years have been observed.
In recent years Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and her colleagues have done a number of imaging studies to better understand how ADHD, and the medication used to treat it, affect the brain.
In they compared the brains of kids with ADHD before and after a year of treatment with stimulant medications. The studies showed an increase in the density of dopamine transporters—those molecules that take dopamine out of action—in the brain after treatment.
This suggests that the increase of dopamine stimulated by the medication may have prompted the brain to develop more dopamine transmitters to clear it away. How long that change might last is not clear, as the level of transporters in the brain fluctuates. But it could result, researchers note in their conclusion, in the medication not working as well as it had to reduce symptoms over the long run. This is a subject of disagreement among clinicians and researchers. For many children the same dose adjusted for growth continues to work for many years.
While the dose increases are modest, they are not just a result of children growing. But over the 13 following months, many of the children had their dosage modified to continue to get the full benefit of the medication. The average increase per unit of body weight was These findings are interpreted differently by different researchers, some seeing evidence that kids developed tolerance for the medication, other not.
Roy Boorady , MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute, says he often increases the dosage within the first several years of treating a child. But after 15 or 16, I find that kids end up needing less, not more.
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