DIAGNOSIS
Girls with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suffer from a deficit of attention themselves-from both their parents and the media. But a new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that ADHD may be equally common in both genders, though boys are more frequently diagnosed with it. "In clinical life, the ratio of males [with ADHD] to females is 10 to 1," says study author Joseph Biederman, Ph.D. "In real life, it's maybe 2 to 1."
A psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, Biederman found that ADHD is transmitted with similar ease through the families of both afflicted girls and boys, showing "that they have the same kind of disease and risk factors as boys." And relatives of ADHD girls had a lower risk of conduct disorder than ADHD boys' relatives, just as the girls themselves suffer less often from conduct disorder, indicating that two familial subtypes of ADHD exist--one that is mostly male and related to conduct disorder, and the other with an even male-female ratio that is not,
