Delinquent Behavior and Emerging Substance Use in the MTA at 36 Months: Prevalence, Course, and Treatment Effects.

The article presents a study focusing on the prevalence, course and treatment effects on delinquent behavior and emerging substance use in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (MTA). The objective of this research is to compare delinquent behavior and substance use between the children in the MTA. It specifically focuses in a local normative comparison group at 24 and 36 months postrandomization. The study also aims to examine if the outcomes were predicted by the randomly assigned treatments and subsequent self-selected prescribed drugs. It concludes that the cause-and-effect relationships between medication treatment and delinquency are not clear. A re-evaluation of medication treatment and substance use are needed at older age.