Can Childhood ADHD Lead to Adult Obesity?

Researchers connected childhood attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with over-eating and adult obesity in recent study published in Pediatrics, according to Time magazine.

In the 33-year study, boys with ADHD were documented into adulthood, and researchers concluded that hyperactive boys were twice as likely to to have a higher body mass index (BMI) and rates of obesity than men without the condition as a child.

Out of the men diagnosed with ADHD as children, 41 percent were obese as compared to 22 percent of men who did not have the condition. While researchers said they did not initially set out to explore this link, as the study was initially designed to explore the differences in brain structures of people with ADHD, in 2003 they found that many of the study participants were too large fit the brain MRI machines used to evaluate their psychiatric health.

"One of these gentlemen really wanted to help out, but we had to squeeze him in, inch by inch," said Dr. Francisco Xavier Castellanos, the study's senior author and a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University's Langone Medical Center.

After asking the subjects to give their height and weight measurements for practical reasons, researchers discovered that three times as many men from the childhood ADHD group could not fit inside the scanner, a ratio of 17 to six men who did not have the disorder, and decided to systematically collect data on the participants' weight.

"There had been suggestions in the past that ADHD might be related to obesity," said Castellanos. "There were a lot of checks to make sure this was not due to other conditions. We were able to confirm that this risk seemed really related to childhood diagnosis of ADHD."

While it is not entirely clear why the disorder, which makes focusing and concentrating on tasks more difficult, would cause men to develop higher rates of obesity than their non-disordered peers, researchers suspect that "impulsivity and poor decision-making skills" play a role in this phenomenon.

"We live in a society with super-sized amounts of food," Castellanos said. "If someone has less than the average amount of self-control because of the ADHD, they are less able to withstand the temptations of food."

The findings of the study were concluded after researchers controlled for variables including depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, socioeconomic status and lifetime mental disorders. However, "the study had limiting factors, such as missing height and weight for some participants, and a lack of participants with persistent ADHD," according to Counsel&Heal. 

However, the results of this study suggest that maintaining a healthy weight may be a struggle for those with ADHD.