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The Effect
of Vitamin-Mineral Supplementation on the Effects of Juvenile Delinquency |
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There is disagreement
among professionals involved in research and treatment of ADHD as to the usefulness
of vitamin and mineral supplementation as an effective treatment strategy. In
a recently published review of the literature on alternative treatments it
was concluded that mineral supplementation (e.g. iron, magnesium) in ADHD
children shown to be deficient in those minerals yielded promising results in
several studies and warranted additional research using double-blind,
placebo-controlled trials. However, no convincing data on the use of vitamin
supplementation has been reported that I am aware of, and a recent review of
alternative treatments for ADHD is very negative about this approach. It
should be noted that this applies to mega-vitamin treatments in which
children are given very large doses of certain vitamins, rather than simply
bringing children up to currently recommended levels. You
may be curious about the impact of possible vitamin and mineral deficiencies
on aggression and other forms of antisocial behavior. Although such behavior
is not among the core symptoms of ADHD, and many children with ADHD do not
display any significant antisocial characteristics, it is widely documented
that such behaviors do occur at elevated rates among ADHD children. Might
vitamin and mineral deficiencies stemming from poor nutritional habits play a
role in the development of antisocial behavior among school-age children? This
question was addressed in a study published in the Journal of Alternative and
Complementary Medicine (Schoenthaler, S.J., & Bier, I.D., Vol. 6, 2000.)
Participants in this study included 468 children between the ages of 6 and 12
from two predominantly Hispanic elementary schools. This represented
approximately 75% of the total population of those schools from which
parental consent to participate was obtained. The
design of this study was simple and straightforward. Children were randomly
assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. Care was taken
to ensure that the groups were equated in terms of children’s intellectual
ability. Children in the experimental group received two chewable tablets
each day for four months that provided daily vitamin-mineral supplementation
at 50% of the tablets
provided no vitamin or mineral supplementation). Throughout
this time period, the antisocial behavior of study participants at school was
carefully tracked. Children were disciplined for antisocial behavior
including things like fighting, threatening others, property destruction, and
refusing to complete their work. The numbers of such behaviors that occurred
over the 4-month study period and were deemed by school staff to reflect
serious rule violations were tallied. This enabled the researchers to compare
the rates of antisocial acts among those children receiving the
vitamin-mineral supplementation treatment with those children receiving only
a placebo. Rather
than make this comparison among all the children participating, the authors
restricted their analysis to 80 children (40 in each group) who had been
formally disciplined for violating school rules during the 4 months prior to
the start of the study. This was done
because they were interested in whether vitamin-mineral supplementation
resulted in reduced antisocial behavior; and among those children who had not
committed any prior antisocial acts according to school records, no such
improvement would be possible. It is important to note that the children in
the supplement and placebo groups did not differ on any pretreatment measures
examined (such as IQ or their number of prior offenses). RESULTS Before
examining the impact of the vitamin-mineral supplementation on children’s
rates of serious rules violations, the authors first examined whether
children could detect whether they had received the supplement or the
placebo. The majority of children--regardless of actual group
assignment--guessed that they had received the supplements, and the rate of
accurate guessing did not differ between the groups. During
the 4-month intervention period, the children who received the active
vitamin-mineral supplementation had an average rate of serious rule
violations at school of 1 per child. For children receiving the placebo, the
average number of serious rules violations nearly doubled to 1.875 per child.
This is a statistically significant difference. The reason for the higher
average rate among the placebo group was due almost entirely to a relatively
small number of children who committed multiple offenses. Thus, among
children receiving the supplements, there was only a single child who
committed more than one offense during the 4-month study period. Among the
placebo group, in contrast, there were 9 students who committed multiple
offenses. SUMMARY AND
IMPLICATIONS This
well designed study provides solid preliminary evidence that for some
children, vitamin and mineral deficiencies may play a significant role in
their behavioral difficulties. The authors suggest that this occurs because
of the adverse affect that vitamin and mineral deficiencies can have on brain
functioning. They also note that their findings replicate those that have
been reported in several prior studies. This
cannot be concluded with certainty for several reasons, however. First, we do
not know whether those children in the placebo group who committed multiple
offenses were actually deficient in key vitamin or minerals to begin with
because such an assessment was not conducted. Second, we do not know whether
providing active supplements to the more serious offenders in the placebo
group would have resulted in a reduction in their antisocial behavior. Such a
finding would have been particularly compelling, although this was probably
not possible to do because it would have extended the study beyond the school
year. It
is also important to emphasize that because children in this study were not
selected according to core ADHD symptoms, and ADHD symptoms were not one of
the outcome measures reported, the implications of these results for children
with ADHD are unclear. Thus, this
particular study provides no information on whether vitamin and mineral deficiencies are related to ADHD symptoms and whether supplementation might be helpful with these symptoms. One could interpret these results as suggesting that vitamin and mineral supplementation may be helpful in minimizing the amount of antisocial behavior engaged in by children with ADHD, although the caveats noted above would certainly apply and a careful replication of this work is necessary. |
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