CHICAGO, (AFP) - Children suffering from attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder respond better to medication than behavioral treatment, US researchers said Tuesday.
A landmark study of about 600 schoolchildren found that regular drug therapy with clinical supervision was more effective than intensive behavioral therapy alone.
Children treated with medication and therapy together also showed a marked improvement in their symptoms, compared to the child volunteers who received psychotherapy only, according to the study in the American Medical Association's Archives of General Psychiatry.
Nine out of 10 children on the first major clinical trial of childhood mental illness improved substantially on one of these regimes, the researchers said.
In an accompanying editorial, an expert from Kings College, London urged doctors not to hesitate in prescribing the drugs.
"Children with suboptimal responses to behavioral approaches should therefore be offered medication as well," said Eric Taylor, at the College's Institute of Psychiatry.
"This is quite often not done or done only after a long delay, perhaps years," he warned.
And he said Europe and Asia lag behind the United States in this respect.
"Information about the quantities of medication used annually and the numbers of prescriptions suggest that stimulants are used between 10 and 30 times more frequently in the United States than in the United Kingdom," he wrote.
The rates in southern Europe, Scandinavia, eastern Europe and south Asia trailed even those of Britain, he noted.
ADHD afflicts between three and five percent of school-age children, according to the authors of the study at the National Institute of Mental Health and Columbia University in New York.
On average at least one child in every classroom in the United States needs help for the disorder, whose symptoms include an inability to sustain attention and concentration, developmentally inappropriate levels of activity, distractibility and impulsivity.
