7.3 Stimulant’s Impact on Cardiovascular Parameters: Striving for Individualized Risk Assessment

Stimulant class medications are known to cause elevations in cardiovascular (CV) parameters, heart rate (HR), and blood pressure (BP) in children with ADHD. The predominant findings in the literature are small mean increases in HR and BP, without consideration of putative moderating and mediating variables impacting CV response. Clinicians and families would benefit from an individualized approach to CV risk analysis. This presentation is an up-to-date literature review on the topic, inclusive of a unique post hoc CV examination in a large, ethnically diverse sample group of children with ADHD.