Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesTreatment Effects of Methylphenidate on Behavioral Adjustment in Children With Mental Retardation and ADHD
Section snippets
PARTICIPANTS
Twenty-four children with ADHD/MR (18 boys and 6 girls) participated in this study. The mean chronological age of these children was 10.9 years (SD = 2.4), the mean IQ (Stanford-Binet, 4th edition) (Thorndike et al., 1986) was 56.5 (SD = 10.24), and the mean mental age (estimated using the Stanford-Binet) was 5.7 years (SD = 1.2). Seventeen children had mild (50+) MR; seven had moderate MR. The ethnic breakdown of these children was as follows: 9 white, 14 African American, and 1 Hispanic. The
RESULTS
The data were analyzed using SPSS-PC (version 10.0) repeated-measures one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedures, with MPH dosage as the within-subjects variable. Because preliminary analyses revealed no significant effects of gender or dose order, these factors were dropped from subsequent analyses. For significant effects, post hoc Student-Newman-Keuls analyses were performed to determine which doses of medication were significantly different from one another (p ≤ .05). Because the
DISCUSSION
Our findings of decreases in ADHD symptomatology with MPH treatment in children with ADHD/MR are consistent with those of previous investigations (e.g., Hagerman et al., 1988;Handen et al. (1991), our participants did not experience significant increases in serious side effects such as staring, social withdrawal, and anxiety at the 0.6 mg/kg dose. In fact, the 0.6 mg/kg b.i.d. MPH dose produced the maximum treatment benefit, but it was also associated with the typical MPH side effects of
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Cited by (0)
This research was supported by NIMH grant R29 MH48212 . The authors thank the parents, teachers, and children who participated in this study. The authors are indebted to John E. Overall, Ph.D., who provided additional statistical consultation.