The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases statistics about trends in children who are diagnosed as LD or ADHD every couple of years.
According to the report conclusion, "This report contains information that may help educators, health planners, and health professionals assess the service needs of children with diagnosed ADHD and LD." We'll be the judge of that!
They have a PDF of the 2008 report that lays out their findings however there remains questions as to the sociological/academic outcomes after a diagnosis is made. How does a diagnosis impact their educational outcomes? What percentage of students who are diagnosed get the academic services they need? They seem content with using special education enrollment data for use as their LD and ADHD measurements but there are questions of undiagnosed cases which leads to a deflated rate of diagnosis caused by social stigmatizing.
It's nice to know that the CDC is looking at LD and ADHD as diseases of interest... But I would expect this from the NIMH, the NCMHD, or even the NINDS (among the 27 various acronyms in the NIH)...
A funny side note: Every time I see the acronym for the NIMH, I think of the book, "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" by Robert C. O'Brien. When I first read the book as a child, I never understood that NIMH was an actual place and only recently did it occur to me that the reference was to the National Institute of Mental Health. I thought NIMH was like some strange lab, but didn't think it actually existed... I was like 9 or 10 years old at the time.
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