If your child was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), he or she is not alone. The diagnosis of ADHD in American children and adolescents seems to have gone up over the past 20 years, according to a new study.
The percentage of kids with ADHD went from 6.1 percent in 1997-1998 to 10.2 percent in 2015-2016, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open. The percentage of boys with ADHD was 9 percent in 1997-1998 and rose to 14 percent by 2015-2016; the number of girls went from 3.1 percent to 6.3 percent during the same time span.
Researchers looked at data from 186,457 U.S. children derived from the National Health Interview Study. Kids involved in it were ages 4 to 17 years old. The cause of the uptick still needs to be better understood, the authors say.
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