Frequent digital media use preceded more teen ADHD symptoms

The short answer

A two-year study of Los Angeles high schoolers found that teenagers using more digital media activities at high frequency were more likely to report new ADHD symptoms later on. The association was real and statistically significant, but modest, and the authors were careful to say it does not prove media use causes ADHD.

What the evidence says

Ra, Cho, Stone and colleagues published their cohort study in JAMA on 17 July 2018, following 2,587 tenth-graders without baseline ADHD symptoms across 24 months, with follow-ups at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months. Participants reported how often they engaged in 14 digital media activities, from checking social media to multiplayer gaming to video chatting. Each additional activity used at high frequency was associated with significantly higher odds of new ADHD symptoms (adjusted odds ratio 1.10 per activity). Students reporting no high-frequency activities had a 4.6% rate of new symptoms, rising to 9.5% among those using seven activities frequently and 10.5% among those using all 14; video chatting showed the strongest single association.

For context

The authors listed several reasons this association is not evidence of cause: symptoms could reflect previously undiagnosed ADHD rather than new onset, teenagers already showing subtle attention difficulties might be drawn to fragmented, high-frequency media use rather than the other way round, and self-reported activity counts were not checked against objective device data. This fits the broader pattern described in Odgers and Jensen's 2020 review of adolescent technology research: most findings in this field, including this one, are correlational and cannot on their own settle which direction the relationship runs.

A practical next step

Rather than treating any single high-frequency activity as a warning sign, it may be more useful to notice whether your teenager is juggling many different media activities in short bursts throughout the day.

• Is your teenager frequently switching between several different apps or activities, or spending sustained time on one or two?
• Have attention or focus difficulties shown up in settings other than screen use, such as schoolwork or conversation?
• Would it be more informative to track patterns over months than to react to a single busy week?

The study gives a specific, dated, statistically modest association between high-frequency multi-activity media use and later ADHD symptoms in one large adolescent cohort. It does not establish that digital media causes ADHD, and the authors themselves called for further research to separate cause from reverse cause and shared risk factors.