[Source: Yahoo News]

Boys and girls diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) face a significantly higher risk of developing a substance abuse problem -- including cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, new research reveals.

"Our study, which is one of the largest set of longitudinal studies of this issue to date, supports the association between ADHD and substance abuse found in several earlier studies and shows that the increased risk cannot be accounted for by co-existing factors such as other psychiatric disorders or family history of substance abuse," lead author Dr. Timothy Wilens, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said in a news release from Massachusetts General Hospital.

"Overall, study participants diagnosed with ADHD had a one-and-a-half times greater risk of developing substance abuse than did control participants," he added.

Wilens, who is also with the Massachusetts General Hospital Pediatric Psychopharmacology Unit in Boston, and his colleagues reported the findings in the June issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

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