Can you imagine the most difficult environment for a child who had difficulty sitting still, difficulty paying attention, and loved to talk to other children? Imagine that this child had to go into this environment every day, and was expected to perform successfully in this environment.

When you think about it, it is the classroom setting that is this difficult setting for these kids. There are a lot of distractions, yet they are told to sit still, don't move, don't talk, to pay attention to boring worksheets, and keep on task until the work is finished. None of these things come easily to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder kids. But day by day, off to school they go.

Many Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder kids "hit a wall" in school as the school year progresses. Every week they just get a little farther and farther behind, until they're so far behind that it's impossible to catch up. They lose their homework assignments, even after they have spent hours working on them. And they study hard for tests only to perform poorly the next day. They just slip farther and farther behind with each passing week.

The disorder is most often recognized and referred for treatment in third grade.This is when kids most often hit the "academic wall." In third grade they are expected to do more and more work on their own, and they are given more homework to do as well. We also see many referrals in seventh grade, or when the child leaves Elementary School for Junior High School, with several classes and several teachers. Many Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder kids who found ways to compensate in Elementary School are totally lost in Junior High School.

How can we help these children to be more successful in school? Begin by learning more about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder from the ADHD Information's family of web sites. Here is one of our outstanding web sites with over 500 Classroom Interventions to help your ADD ADHD Student succeed:http://www.ADDinSchool.com.

A couple of months ago we reported that Shire Pharmaceuticals was looking to receive approval on their third medication for the treatment of ADHD named VYVANSE, and now they have received it from the FDA. This new medication will go along with Shire's two other products for ADHD, Daytrana, a methylphenadate patch worn by children on the hip, and the somewhat controversial ADDerall XR. All three products are once per day dosing.

The product is expected to be on the market by the summer of 2007, and is expected to generate a lot of money for Shire. In fact, Shire is so fond of stimulants for the treatment of ADHD that they paid $2,600,000,000 (yes, that's 2.6 Billion dollars) for New river Pharmaceuticals, the company that actually developed Vyvanse. Read more in the press release below about the new medication, the money, and the companies.

Press Release - VYVANSE - February 23, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Shire and New River Pharmaceuticals Announce FDA Approval of the First and Only Stimulant Prodrug VYVANSE (lisdexamfetamine dimesylate) as a Novel Treatment for ADHD.

The first long-term, large-scale study designed to determine the safety and effectiveness of treating preschoolers who have attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with methylphenidate (Ritalin) has found that overall, low doses of this medication are effective and safe. However, the study found that children this age are more sensitive than older children to the medication's side effects and therefore should be closely monitored. The 70-week, six-site study was funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and was described in several articles in the November 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

"The Preschool ADHD Treatment Study, or PATS, provides us with the best information to date about treating very young children diagnosed with ADHD," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, MD. "The results show that preschoolers may benefit from low doses of medication when it is closely monitored, but the positive effects are less evident and side-effects are somewhat greater than previous reports in older children."

Methylphenidate is the most commonly prescribed medication to treat children diagnosed with ADHD. But its use for children younger than 6 years has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And until PATS, very few studies—and no large-scale ones—have been conducted to collect reliable, consistent data to help guide practitioners treating preschoolers with ADHD.

The 303 preschoolers enrolled in the study ranged in age from 3 to 5 years. The children and their parents participated in a pre-trial, 10-week behavioral therapy and training course. Only those children with the most extreme ADHD symptoms who did not improve after the behavioral therapy course and whose parents agreed to have them treated with medication were included in the medication study. In the first part of the medication study, the children took a range of doses from a very low amount of 3.75 mg daily of methylphenidate, administered in three equal doses, up to 22.5 mg/day. By comparison, doses for school-aged children usually range from 15 to 50 mg total daily.

The study then compared the effectiveness of methylphenidate to placebo. It found that the children taking methylphenidate had a more marked reduction of their ADHD symptoms compared to children taking a placebo, and that different children responded best to different doses.