ADHD Kids May Have Bipolar Disorder, Too
Treating ADHD Alone May Worsen Bipolar Symptoms
Oct. 29, 2002 (San Francisco) -- Distractibility, hyperactivity, and talkativeness are all hallmark signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as any parent of a child with ADHD can tell you. In a minority of children, though, they can also be signs of childhood-onset bipolar disorder.
A new study presented at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry shows that a child can have both disorders and that simultaneous ADHD and bipolar disorder in a child may be a distinct disorder, according to Janet Wozniak, MD, who presented the study. Furthermore, because ADHD is more common than bipolar disorder, the latter diagnosis may be overlooked.
Therefore, when parents take a child with ADHD for treatment, they would be wise to share any family history of bipolar disorder with the doctor, said Wozniak, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where she directs bipolar disorder research in the pediatric psychopharmacology department at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"If a child with ADHD has an undiagnosed bipolar disorder as well, conventional ADHD therapy can worsen the bipolar disorder," she tells WebMD. The typical therapy for ADHD is a stimulant such as Ritalin or Adderall.
"The good news is that if the child also has bipolar disorder, we can treat those symptoms first with a mood-stabilizing medication," she says. "Then if we treat any remaining ADHD symptoms with a stimulant, the child will typically be fine on the combined medications."
Wozniak's group wanted to know if there was a familial association of ADHD and bipolar disorder among parents and siblings of young people with bipolar disorder.
The investigators conducted interviews with 189 parents and siblings of 69 children who had bipolar disorder. They compared the data on these children and their relatives with similar information on the relatives of children with ADHD but without bipolar disorder, and with information on children who did not have either disorder.
They found that of the children that had bipolar disorder, 14% of the relatives had bipolar disorder and 20% had ADHD. Among the children with only ADHD, 4% of the relatives had bipolar disorder and 19% had ADHD. Among the children free of either disorder, only 3% of the relatives had bipolar disorder and only 5% had ADHD.