THE prescription of ADHD medications is connected to a range of safety benefits such as reductions in self harm and unintentional injury, but some of these links appear to have weakened as more people have been prescribed, according to international research.

A study of almost 250,000 people prescribed ADHD medications in Sweden between 2006-2020 found that medication prescriptions were consistently linked to a reduced risk of self-harm, unintentional injury, road accidents and crime.

However, the researchers found that as the prevalence of prescriptions rose from 0.6% to 2.8% of children and 0.1% to 1.3% of adults over the study period, the link between medication and reduced injury, crashes and crime has decreased.

The weakening trends for unintentional injury and traffic crashes were not fully explained by changes in age and sex distribution of the medication users, and the trend for crime was no longer statistically significant, they said.

This is likely a result of people with less severe ADHD now being diagnosed and treated with medication, they added.

“The magnitude of associations between ADHD medication use and lower risk of unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime appear to have attenuated over time, coinciding with an increase in prescription prevalence during the same period,” the authors wrote.

“These findings suggest that the declining strength of the associations of ADHD medication and real-world outcomes could be attributed to the expansion of prescriptions to a broader group of individuals having fewer symptoms or impairments.

“These results remind us that in clinical practice, the treatment decisions should be made by a careful balancing of the benefits and risks for each individual,” they concluded.

It was suggested further research is needed to identify whether there are subgroups of patients who may benefit more from alternative or supplemental treatment strategies.

Read the paper HERE. KB

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