"It's clear that a fair number of these children need medicine and it makes a big difference," he said in a telephone interview. He said he was "cautiously optimistic" about using the drugs in very young children.

Too Risky

The risks of the drugs far outweigh their benefits, said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a New York-based consumer advocacy group.

These drugs "play Russian roulette with young children's developing brains and central nervous system," she said. "It is a complete abdication of the do-no-harm principle in medicine."

More than 2,500 children went to hospital emergency rooms in 2004 after taking ADHD drugs, most because of accidental overdoses, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in May.

About one in four children who took the drugs and went to emergency rooms had symptoms or tests suggesting serious heart or blood pressure events including palpitations, chest pain or fainting, CDC said at the time. Many other cases involved children who accidentally took someone else's medication, the report found.

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E-mail: jlauerman@bloomberg.net, rwaters@bloomberg.net