LeFever ADHD Study - Case of Misconduct? | ADHD Information

Anyone heard about this study?

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=81031&a mp;r an=147522

By BILL SIZEMORE, The Virginian-Pilot
© January 24, 2005

Did ADHD study miss the mark?

NORFOLK — In addition to sand, sea and sailors, Hampton Roads suddenly acquired a reputation three years ago for fidgety kids.

A local researcher, Gretchen LeFever of Eastern Virginia Medical School, burst onto the national scene with some startling and worrisome findings: Southeastern Virginia was a hotbed of overmedication for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. That’s the medical term applied to people who are so inattentive, unfocused and impulsive that they have difficulty learning and developing social skills.

LeFever reported that an astounding 17 percent of Hampton Roads schoolchildren – three to six times national estimates – had been diagnosed with the disorder and that the vast majority were being medicated for it. Her findings brought into question whether local doctors were too liberally treating children for ADHD.

“CBS Evening News” reported that a “staggering increase” in ADHD diagnoses had become “a problem of epic proportions in Southeastern Virginia.” CNN, PBS, NPR, newspapers all over the country, even Popular Science magazine, cited LeFever’s research.

Virginia’s General Assembly responded to the publicity surge with legislation to study and then rectify the problem. LeFever received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government grants to do follow-up research.

Three years later, LeFever’s dramatic findings and research methods are under attack on multiple fronts.

Two state government studies of ADHD medication rates turned up much lower estimates than LeFever’s. A Regent University doctoral student, who tried to replicate her research for his dissertation, also discovered far fewer local children identified with ADHD.

Concerns about LeFever’s methods led two local elementary schools to withdraw from her latest follow-up study. And after a subsequent internal review, EVMS recently shut down the study before it could be completed and placed LeFever, an associate professor, on leave.

Next month, the peer-reviewed journal that initially published LeFever’s findings in 2002 will have a correction after a discrepancy was discovered between her published article and the wording of the survey she used to generate her data.

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