Powerful antipsychotic medications are being used to treat children and teenagers with ADHD, aggression and behavior problems, a study finds, even though safer treatments are available and should be used first.
"There's been concern that these medications have been overused, particularly in young children," says Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who led thestudy. It was published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry. "Guidelines and clinical wisdom suggest that you really should be using a high degree of caution and only using them when other treatments have failed, as a last resort."
Olfson and his colleagues looked at prescription data from about 60 percent of the retail pharmacies in the United States in 2006, 2008 and 2010. That included almost 852,000 children, teenagers and young adults. Teens were most likely to be prescribed antipsychotics, with 1.19 percent getting the drugs in 2010, compared to 0.11 percent in younger children. Boys were more likely to be given the medications.
[For more of this story, written by Nancy Shute, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...gression-in-children]
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