Not Approved for Their Use A bottle of Ritalin, a prescription drug for children suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Study shows soaring use of psychiatric drugs.
Julie Magno Zito, a pharmacologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore and the lead researcher of the study, found that between 1 percent and 1.5 percent of preschoolers in two state Medicaid programs and in one regional HMO were getting these medications, known as psychotropics. The investigators analyzed drug use during the time period 1991-1995 in approximately 150,000 children in a Midwestern state Medicaid program, a Middle Atlantic Medicaid program, and in an HMO located in the Northwest. Ritalin, and most of the drugs in the study are, therefore, being prescribed off-label, meaning that they weren't originally approved for that use but, according to Food and Drug Administration guidelines, may still be prescribed with caution. There were hints, even before this study, that psychotropic drug use in young children was on the rise. Zito and her colleagues cited in the article a 1994 report revealing that 3,000 prescriptions for Prozac had been written for children under the age of 1.