Premature death?

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English: Approximate Prevalence Distribution o...
English: Approximate Prevalence Distribution of the Subtypes of ADHD as cited by Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adult ADHD. New York, NY: Routledge. 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I remember the moment well. My ex- used to love to shop (she may still, but I have no clue about that) and disappear for hours.

One afternoon, she came home and declared, “What the …. is going on here?”

I was in the family room, reading the (five or six) Sunday papers that arrived that day. Oh. And, the TV was on. So was the radio tuner. Yup. You guessed it. The CD player was spinning, too.

My ex wanted to know why everything was on. My only answer was that I was reading the papers. And, the cacophony enabled me to devote my attention to the news.

As you can see, had I been born a few decades later, I probably would have been diagnosed with ADD- attention deficit disorder. (Nowadays, we lump this together with hyperactivity and term the diagnosis ADHD for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.) About 9% of US kids are so diagnosed- which is amazing when you realize the incidence is under 0.5% in France! (I have some answers for why this is so- but I’ll hold them for another post.)

What you may not recognize is those so diagnosed are more likely to die young. Not from the affliction per se- but because they are more likely to succumb to automobile and other type accidents. These results were just reported in an online advance publication of the Lancet.

(This reminds me of the early 1970s, when the petrochemical industry thought it was still the Wild West era and did not maintain adequate safety standards. So much so that the average life span for chemical engineers was way under 50 years of age. Once the government began regulating petrochemical plant safety and operations, we ChemE’s were much more likely to live a normal span. With only 4 or 5 thousand new ChemE’s a year, it doesn’t take many young ‘uns dying to radically change the average age at death.)

Drs. Dalsgaard, Dinesen-Ostergaard, Leckman and Mortenson (along with Ms. M. Pederson) of Aarhus Universit analyzed  a large population segment of Danish subjects, who were born between 1981 and 2011. Of the 1.92 million folks studied, some 32,061 were diagnosed with ADHD. The researchers determined mortality rate ratios (adjusted for calendar year, age, sex, parental age and education) to compare those so diagnosed to the (1.89 million remaining) “normal” individuals.

Now, don’t get too excited. The death rate for ADHD kids by age 33 was only 3 per 1000. But, that rate was was about twice the rate of premature death for those without the ADHD diagnosis. Unless the diagnosis was compounded with other problems (like drug abuse)- then the death rate skyrocketed.

Oh, and given that we now are studying the differences between genders (see my post of last week)… girls and women with ADHD had higher death rates than did the boys and men.

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