Attention deficit disorder affects 2 – 8pct of youth

Jorge Sales Marques

A talk was held at the Rui Cunha Foundation late last week discussing attention deficit disorder (ADD) and hyperactivity in young people.

ADD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by an individual’s difficulty in sustaining attention or controlling their behavior. The difficulty in question is considered inappropriate for the individual’s age and can cause social problems such as poor performance in education.

The talk on Thursday night was led by Jorge Sales Marques, the president of the Macau Portuguese-language Doctors Association, who discussed the profiles of children who have ADD, how medical professionals diagnose the problem and the types of treatment that are used both at home and at school.
“Nowadays, attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity are still problems in Macau, affecting mostly infants and adolescents,” Marques told the Times in an interview prior to the talk. “[ADD] has a prevalence rate of between 2 and 8 percent […] and is a real problem in Macau.”

“Treatment depends on the child and their age, but therapy and medicine – particularly Ritalin – are common,” he explained. “This problem [ADD] has been well-known for many years but some treatments are considered controversial.”

“When we treat the child, we need to treat the disorder correctly according to the available criteria. There is a good safety record for these treatments – around 70 to 90 percent are successful – but there can be side effects, which is why we need to diagnose [accurately].”

In Macau, the standard criteria used for diagnosis is a method called “DSM-5”, which stands for the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association.

“We have these kinds of patients at our hospital,” said Marques. “People can send their children and we can diagnose the problem correctly.” DB