Health & Science

Is ADHD being overdiagnosed?

The number of children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is exploding, raising concerns that doctors are overprescribing powerful drugs to kids and teens. The diagnosis rate of the disorder has soared 41 percent in the U.S. over the past decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than one in 10 school-age children has been diagnosed with ADHD, and nearly one in five high-school-age boys has. “Those are astronomical numbers,” Yale School of Medicine pediatrician William Graf tells The New York Times. He and other experts say the increase is largely the fault of doctors yielding to pressure from parents to medicate kids who have only mild behavioral problems or trouble concentrating. Stimulants used to treat ADHD, like Ritalin and Adderall, have become popular “study drugs” among college and high school students with negligible symptoms; those who have prescriptions distribute as many as 30 percent of their pills to friends who don’t. The criteria doctors use to diagnose ADHD rely solely on patients’ or their parents’ descriptions of symptoms, yet medical authorities are further loosening those criteria even as evidence mounts that ADHD medications can be addictive. “We have kids out there getting these drugs to use them as mental steroids,” says child psychiatrist Ned Hallowell. “That’s dangerous.”

A bad year for bees

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Colony collapse disorder, the mysterious scourge that has been killing off honeybees since 2005, has suddenly become a lot more deadly. This past winter, as many as half of all hives succumbed to the disorder—up from one third annually in recent years, and between 5 and 10 percent when hives were healthy. “It is a catastrophe in progress,’’ beekeeper Steve Ellis tells Reuters.com. A quarter of the plant-based foods Americans eat rely on honeybees to pollinate them. Researchers still can’t say exactly what is causing the bee die-off. Drought, mites, or viruses could be partly to blame, but studies increasingly suggest that a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids are the root of the problem. The pesticides, which came into wide use around the time colony collapse began, have been shown to scramble bees’ memory, making it difficult for them to find food. Last month, a group of beekeepers and environmental organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency, demanding that it immediately ban two widely used neonicotinoids. But that may not be enough to stem the tide of bee deaths, says University of Maryland entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp: “It’s quite astonishing how many chemicals are in the environment, probably affecting bee health.”

How microbes affect weight

Could altering the bacteria in your gut be the key to weight loss? An intriguing new study has shown that gastric bypass surgery, which reduces the amount of food the stomach can hold, also changes the mix of microbes in the digestive tract—and that this altered microbiome accounts for 20 percent of the pounds people drop after undergoing the procedure. Recent research has also shown that the gut ecosystem of obese people changes after gastric bypass to more closely resemble that of normal-weight people. To determine whether the changed microbe population was a cause or an effect of weight loss, Harvard University scientists gave gastric bypass surgery to a group of mice and then implanted their new gut flora into mice bred to carry no bacteria at all. These mice quickly lost weight—suggesting that adjusting people’s microbe levels, without surgery, might one day give doctors “an entirely new way to treat the critical problem of obesity,’’ study author Lee Kaplan tells the Los Angeles Times. “We’re learning that the story is more complicated than just how much you exercise and how much you eat.”

Assassins of the insect world

They may look fragile, but dragonflies could be the deadliest predator in the animal kingdom, says The New York Times. The insects catch and eat 95 percent of the smaller flying insects they attack; great white sharks catch half their prey, by comparison, and lions only a quarter. “The dragonfly comes from behind and below, and the prey doesn’t know what’s coming,” says Harvard entomologist Stacey Combes. New research suggests that dragonflies have a nervous system that allows them to pay attention to a single target amid a variety of competing distractions, much as humans and other primates can. They “have a simple brain of less than a million neurons behaving like our own brain of 100 billion neurons,” says Steven Wiederman of the University of Adelaide in Australia. Along with exceptionally keen eyesight, dragonflies are equipped with four wings that they can maneuver individually, letting them hover, fly backward and upside down, spin 360 degrees, and reach speeds of 30 miles per hour.