Day 039 - 20 Oct 94 - Page 12
1 A. I perhaps should clarify the position. I have
2 reservations about the term "hyperactivity" and
3 "hyperkinetic syndrome" and various other terms that are
4 used. It is used rather as a catch all phrase, as a rather
5 loose diagnostic category. I have read books and papers,
6 some of them emerging from the United States, claiming that
7 up to 50 per cent of populations in some schools could be
8 probably labelled "hyperactive".
9
10 I am unhappy with that. I think that is too loose. That
11 would imply far too loose a use of the term. It seems to
12 me the correct use of the term is to refer not just to
13 situations in which the behaviour of children is beyond the
14 control of perhaps their parents or teachers, but it should
15 be properly reserved only for circumstances when the
16 behaviour of the children is beyond their own control.
17
18 I would not venture to assign a precise figure to the
19 incidence of hyperactivity so defined in children, but what
20 I would say is that, while I am satisfied that amongst
21 those children who I think can be properly called
22 hyperactive, a significant proportion of them do react
23 adversely to some food ingredients, including additives, it
24 would be a mistake to suppose that all hyperactivity in all
25 children is due solely to either food or food additives.
26 Food additives are amongst the triggers responsible for the
27 condition in some children.
28
29 Q. Just to clarify the anecdotal evidence on this, we have
30 heard that double-blind studies have almost never been
31 done?
32 A. Yes.
33
34 Q. We have heard that animal testing does not show up ----
35 A. Yes.
36
37 Q. -- hyperactive responses. So, in effect, the only evidence
38 of any coherence, if you like, for or against is the
39 anecdotal evidence; is that correct?
40 A. Yes, that is correct, but that anecdotal evidence is a
41 very heterogeneous category. I mean, there are some
42 reports in the files of the Hyperactive Children Support
43 Group where there is little more than a parent or a
44 grandparent believes their child or grandchild reacts
45 hyperactively to one or more compounds with no more
46 evidence than that. In other cases, in really a rather
47 large number of cases, the parents and the families and the
48 teachers have approached the problem in quite systematic
49 ways.
50
51 There are two approaches; one is to remove items one by one
52 from the diet until they reach a point at which the
53 symptoms abruptly decline or subside, which can provide
54 some strong circumstantial evidence. The other way is to
55 put the children on a very restrictive diet, an exclusion
56 diet of a very small number of foods of an hyperallergenic
57 nature. If symptoms then subside, can introduce foods one
58 at a time until they reoccur, thereby get fairly robust
59 evidence of what compounds trigger the symptoms.
60
