The condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a common one, especially among children from their earliest years through their young adult years. There have been many prescribed drugs that have proven helpful for those afflicted with the condition but now, new research is coming out that is raising red flags suggesting medications such as Ritalin and Concerta make rare cardiac problems twice as likely, although still uncommon, according to a report in WebMD.
"The risk of adverse cardiac effects of ADHD medication is real and should not be forgotten," said study lead author Dr. Soren Dalsgaard, an associate professor at Aarhus University told Health Magazine.
The findings aren't definitive because they don't prove cause-and-effect and they seem to conflict with some previous research that looked at fewer heart conditions over shorter periods of time, reported WebMd.
Alarms sounded because of reports of sudden deaths, heart attack and stroke related to ADHD drugs, which has led some physicians to assess heart health before starting young people on the drugs.
But a 2011 study of U.S. children and young adults published in the New England Journal of Medicine found no link between ADHD drugs and heart attacks, sudden death and stroke. And in 2012, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found no sign of a link in young and middle-aged adults either.
The new study, published online recently in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, followed 714,000 children in Denmark, born from 1990 to 1999, for an average of 9.5 years. Of those, 8,300 were diagnosed with ADHD after age 5.
Of the total with ADHD, 111 kids -- or a little more than 1 percent -- had a heart problem such as high blood pressure, cardiac arrest,irregular heartbeat or general cardiovascular disease, reported WebMD.
