Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESNational Trends in the Use of Psychotropic Medications by Children
Section snippets
Sources of Data
Data were drawn from the household component of the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES) (Edwards and Berlin, 1989) and the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) (Cohen, 1997a). Both surveys were sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to provide national estimates of the use, expenditures, and financing of health services. The NMES and MEPS surveys were conducted as national probability samples of the U.S. civilian, noninstitutionalized population.
Study Samples
The 1987
Background Characteristics
Table 1 presents the background characteristics of the study samples. Between 1987 and 1996, there was a substantial increase in the proportions of children who were Hispanic, publicly insured, and between 6 and 14 years of age.
Psychotropic Medications
During the study period, the overall rate of psychotropic medication use increased from 1.4 to 3.9 per 100 children and adolescents (Fig. 1). Significant increases were evident across all geographic regions and all age, race/ethnicity, sex, and insurance groups examined.
DISCUSSION
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in the use of psychotropic medications by children in the United States. The increase cut across age, racial/ethnic, geographic, gender, and insurance groups and included stimulants, antidepressants, and other psychotropic medications.
Growth in the use of stimulants, which are almost exclusively prescribed for ADHD (Safer and Krager, 1994), may reflect increasing public acceptance of these medications. An early public survey
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