Tweens and teens double use of diab...(hat childhood obesity not only has long-...),Health

However, she says, the rise of prescription use also indicates that more children are being diagnosed and doctors are increasingly using medication to treat these conditions.

"Our findings indicate that we, the doctors, are doing a better job of screening children and diagnosing chronic conditions," Halloran said. "A great example of this is blood pressure, where there has been a big push to identify and treat children in need."

In several cases, the rates of growth were dramatically higher among girls than boys. While boys still take more medications for chronic conditions, the gap has become narrower due to these increases.

The huge increase in type 2 diabetes medication use was driven largely by girls who saw a 147 percent increase over the four year period, compared to boys who saw a 39 percent increase in medicine use. Researchers say they cannot explain this pattern, which is not consistent with the patterns of obesity among boys and girls. However, increased physician office visits and therefore screening rates particularly for females could be one contributing factor.

Researchers say the greater increase of girls prescribed ADD/ADHD medication (63 percent versus 33 percent) may be attributed to increased efforts by physicians to identify ADHD in females following studies that suggested that inattentive ADHD, which is much less likely to be identified and treated, was more common in girls than boys.

Another example of a higher increase among females was seen in antidepressants where the number of females between 15 and 19 taking the medicine increased by 6.8 percent, while for males in the same age group, utilization declined slightly. This increase in antidepressant use among older teen girls was a striking exception to decreases for boys and girls ages 5 to 9 and boys ag
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