ADHD Increases Traffic Accidents

accidentsPsychiatry News Alert, a service of the American Psychiatric Association that is the source of a number of these posts, reports that a large study finds that people with adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have an increased risk of serious traffic accidents—those leading to injury or death.

The study was recently published in JAMA Psychiatry, and was led by Zheng Chang, Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, it looked at data from about 17,000 people with ADHD, and a non-ADHD sample matched on age, gender, and residential area at the time of diagnosis.

The researchers found that men and women with ADHD were found to be at twice the risk of serious traffic accidents than the matched control group.

In the study, those people with ADHD who were taking ADHD medication had a significant reduction in risk, but this reduction was only seen in men taking medications, not women.