Sexual maturation among youth with ADHD and the impact of stimulant medication.

Objective: Evaluate the differences in achieving puberty between ADHD and non-ADHD participants and the effects of medication on that process among ADHD participants.

Procedure: A subset of participants with ADHD from the Multimodal Treatment study of ADHD (n = 342) were compared with respect to Tanner staging to participants from a comparison group without ADHD (n = 159) at the 36-month follow-up assessment. Further comparisons were made for Tanner stages and Auxology of the participants in the ADHD group who were always (n = 61), never (n = 56), newly (n = 74) and inconsistently (n = 116) treated with stimulants.

Results: No statistically significant differences in Tanner stages of sexual development were found between the ADHD and non-ADHD groups at the age of assessment (between 10 and 14 years of age) or among the ADHD medication subgroups, although a trend was observed for stimulant-associated delayed pubertal initiation using auxological analysis.

Conclusion: Children with or without ADHD did not differ in Tanner stages at the 3-year follow-up assessment, and exposure to stimulant medication does not appear to affect sexual development within this age range.