@TarHeelMark This is the only part of the story that doesn't focus on the research papers.
"But he stumbled upon documents detailing abnormally high percentage rates of UNC athletes with LD/ADHD from 2004 to 2012, a stretch when UNC was trying to revamp its football program. The percentages were consistently three to four times greater than the national average.
In one email from 2007, for example, neuropsychiatrist Thomas Gualtieri, hired by the school as an outside contractor, revealed that among a group that included incoming football players from the previous two years and women’s basketball players from the previous year, 61 percent “had either ADD or a learning disability (or both), and the large majority were previously undiagnosed.”
A paper co-authored by the NCAA’s chief medical officer, Brian Hainline, and published this year says “the prevalence of ADHD in student-athletes and elite athletes may be 7 percent – 8 percent.”
Based on the UNC documents, generally only scholarship athletes were eligible for learning disability testing. And an internal review found that among about 180 UNC athletes tested between 2004 and 2012 – including 137 scholarship football players – there was a “39 percent incidence of LD and or ADHD.”
“If that’s an accurate number, that (does) seem high to me,” says Hainline, a neurologist. “‘Cause it’s unusual for ADHD or LD to somehow just manifest in college. It almost always has manifest already in high school, very often in grade school. It’s unusual just for it to start in college.”
But that’s exactly what Ted Tatos found was happening at UNC. An overwhelming majority of the athletes tested between 2004 and 2012 were diagnosed with ADD, LD or ADHD for the first time at Chapel Hill.
When Tatos dug deeper into the UNC documents, he found that not only were the high LD/ADHD rates
not an anomaly and not specific to one year but that a high percentage of athletes were also being prescribed ADHD medication. While the total number of UNC football players receiving ADHD medication is unclear, a 2009-2010 end-of-year report showed that 16 of 23 freshman football players (70 percent) were prescribed medication.
Mary Willingham was a learning specialist inside the athletic department between 2003 and 2010, working with the neuropsychologists responsible for LD or ADHD testing at UNC. She says there was pressure from coaches to keep players academically eligible to compete, and that diagnosing football players with a learning disability or ADHD was helpful in those efforts.
According to the UNC documents Tatos reviewed, a diagnosis of ADHD often came with special accommodations, including personal note-takers, untimed tests and prescriptions for stimulant medications such as Adderall or Ritalin, which are otherwise banned by the NCAA as performance-enhancing drugs.
In a 2006 email, the issue of ADHD medication among football players set off alarms inside the UNC athletic department. The head athletic trainer expressed concern that “some of our student-athletes are being put on medication that is not documented by student health and our team physician.”
In another email in which the date is redacted, Mario Ciocca, a team physician at UNC, wrote to Willingham and others about a male athlete – his name is also redacted -– who experienced “palpitations” after taking “Adderall before a morning run … ”
“He says he was told the medicine would help him out with practice and I think he interpreted that as he should take his med before practice,” Ciocca wrote. “I know that he was not told by anyone to take it before practice but that’s just how he interpreted it. Please pass on to prescribers so that they are aware that the athletes might have this perception.”
Says Willingham: “Athletes would come in and ask if they can test for ADHD because they were interested in taking the medication as well because they could see that that teammate was able to get more work done or you know, take some, a dosage late in the day to help them do their homework.”