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A McMaster University-led study has found that the mothers of teens with food allergies are more likely than the kids themselves to report that the youth have emotional and behavioural problems. Following 1,300 children involved in an Australian study, the researchers found that at 14 years old, about a third of teens with food allergies reported they had emotional and behavioural problems, but more than 46 per cent of their moms reported those problems. These were depression, anxiety or ADHD rather than defiance or misbehaviour. When the same teens were 21 years old, 44 per cent of those with food allergy reported emotional and behavioural problems, and they were twice as likely as their non-allergic peers to have symptoms of depression that had persisted from adolescence. The study has been published online by the medical journal  Allergy . "Unfortunately, we don't know whether the teens with food allergy are less likely to report problems themselves, or whether t...

"Health Canada has issued a series of black-box warnings about the suicidal potential of ADHD medications. However, these warnings have failed to take into account epidemiological studies showing the opposite, that increased use of this medication has been associated with reduced suicide risk in adolescents," says Dr. Alain Lesage, psychiatrist and researcher at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal (CIUSSS de l'Est-de-l'Île-de-Montréal) and one of study's authors. In the past decade, the medical treatment of ADHD increased three-fold in Quebec, reaching 9% of boys aged 10 years and 4% of boys aged 15 years. However, suicide rates in Quebec's adolescents decreased by nearly 50% during that period among 15-19 year olds, which contradicts the warnings issued by Health Canada. "Clearly, the increased use of ADHD drugs indicates that they might actually reduce rather than augment the risk of suicide," says Edouard Kouassi, pharm...