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I am a 32 year old woman who has been taking medication for ADD since the age of 7. I was always in the 99 percentile for height, before and after taking ritalin. I am 5'10", which was my projected height at the age of 9.
I also have a 6'4" brother-in-law who began taking ritalin at the age of 12. Doesn't appear that his growth was stunted any.
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Terry
Thanks for sharing this information. You manage to break down the information in these studies so well, so even those not familiar with terminology in studies can understand.
I still wonder, however, how studies can actually show that growth is stunted, after all, how do we know what height a child would grow to without the medication? How can you study what is unknown and were family histories of growth all taken into consideration during these studies? Children grow at different rates, some children seem to grow slowly and then quickly spurt up while others grow at a more steady rate.
Eileen
Hi Eileen,
Those are good questions and I don't know the answers! If you look at children in a family, they aren't all the same height, so how can they predict the height regardless of whether they have taken Ritalin or not?
Terry