http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=83832
"Slower brain maturity seen in children with ADHD"
"Crucial parts of brains of children with attention deficit disorder
develop more slowly than other youngsters' brains, a phenomenon
that earlier brain-imaging research missed, a new study says. ...
That was the finding of researchers, led by Dr. Philip Shaw of the
National Institute of Mental Health, who reported the most detailed
study yet on this problem in Monday's online edition of Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. ...  Between 3 percent and 5
percent of school-age children are thought to have attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder.  Dr. Louis J.  Kraus, chief of child
psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said "what
is really important about this study is it shows us there is clearly
something biologically driven for children with ADHD."

http://sciencenews.org/articles/20071201/note11.asp
ADHD kids show slower brain growth
A new brain-scan investigation indicates that attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder involves substantial delays in children's
brain development.

http://sciencenews.org/articles/20071201/note13.asp
Additives may make youngsters hyper
Common food colorings and the preservative sodium benzoate have the
potential to foster hyperactivity and inattentiveness in children,
a new study finds.

My letter to sciencenews.org:

The juxtaposition of the articles
"ADHD kids show slower brain growth" and
"Additives may make youngsters hyper"
in the Dec 1st issue is a glaring indication of the sorry state of
medical science in this country, and how children are paying for it.

A careful reading of the first paper, at
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/49/19649
shows that 66% of the "ADHD" children had received "prior stimulant
treatment", with no apparent attempt to control for this factor.
Stimulants are well known to stunt a wide variety of maturation
measures in children.  This is unworthy of taxpayer-funded research.

Meanwhile, as the second article shows, we continue to feed kids
random chemicals never before encountered in millions of years of
evolution.  It's not at all implausible that genetic variations
account for variations in children's ability to cope with this
equally uncontrolled experiment.  But apparently it's more expedient
to blame and scan their brains for defects than feed them real food.

Who is babysitting american medicine?