"Youngest Children In A Class Are Most Likely To Get ADHD Diagnosis" - Mary Louise Kelly
Sometimes children might get diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder simply because they are younger than their peers and not because of a medical condition. That's one way to interpret a study published online today in The New England Journal of Medicine. In a study held at Harvard Medical School, researchers found children who were born in August have about a 35 percent higher rate of diagnosis and medical treatment compared to the children who were born in September. Jeffrey Newcorn, a psychiatrist and pediatrician who runs the ADHD division at Mount Sinai in New York, finds the results intriguing, but he interprets the study cautiously. He states, “Maybe you're going to be more inclined to call that younger kid ADHD when you wouldn't if you put them in a younger grade, but maybe in a year or two, you would anyway.”
— Jeffrey Newcorn, MD, Associate Professor, Psychiatry, Pediatrics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Director, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, The Mount Sinai Hospital
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