The Forums › Forums › Medication › Ritalin › Ritalin and cancer › Re: Ritalin and cancer
I hadn’t heard anything about this, but after I read your post and did some googling and the study seems highly problematic. There were only 12 children in the study, and there was no separate control group.
12 individuals is a ridiculously small sample size. With such a small group, even random chance could screw up their results. Also there doesn’t seem to have been much done to control confounding factors.
Also, as any University statistics course hammers into the heads of the students “correlation does not equal causation”. Just because two factors occur together doesn’t mean that one causes the other. As my Stats prof liked to say: if you do a plot of the number of pastors and the number of drunks year over year in America in the 19th century, you will get strong correlation. Did pastors cause people to become drunks? Or did drunks cause more men to become pastors? The actual answer is that during the 19th century, the population of America was increasing at rapid rate, so the number of drunks and the number of pastors was also increasing. The rising tide lifted all boats.
Also according to what I’ve read, the Ritalin and chromosomal damage study was conducted over the course of 3 months. Which 3 months, I wonder? If the kids were tested for chromosomal damage in the spring, and then again at the end of summer, increased sun exposure during the summer months could account for an increase in chromosomal damage. Without a separate control group, we have no way of knowing if the kids would have undergone the same increases without being on Ritalin do to a third, unidentified factor.
Also the pediatric oncologist in quoted in this article: http://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/news/20050301/does-ritalin-increase-cancer-risk-in-children
makes a rather excellent point. Ritalin has been used for over 50 years. If there was a significant increase in cancer risk among patients who took it, it would have been picked up on by now.
Also, from what I have read elsewhere, Ritalin has not been shown to be carcinogenic in animal studies.
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