Boston Globe: Researchers Find ADHD Drugs Lack Enough Safety Studies
While ADHD drugs like Ritalin and Adderall have been proven in clinical trials to alleviate symptoms in the short term, very few clinical trials have been performed on their long-term safety, according to a study from Boston Children’s Hospital researchers.
The Boston Globe explains the results of the study, which was published in the journal PLOS One:
[Researchers] identified 32 clinical trials on the 20 ADHD drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and found that only five of the trials focused on drug safety and that each drug was tested on an average of 75 patients before getting FDA approval. The average length of each trial was just four weeks. …
“This is a wake up call for what’s lacking in the drug approval process and what we want to see in the future,’’ said study co-author Dr. Kenneth Mandl, chair of biomedical informatics at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Our findings are particularly troubling since these drugs are so widely used and used for years, not weeks.’’
You can read the rest of the Globe’s story here.
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