The details for our season opener were determined last month, as the Reds host Leicester City at Leigh Sports Village on Sunday 7 September, at midday.
Our subsequent three top-flight fixtures will also take place on a Sunday, starting with the trip to newly promoted London City Lionesses on 14 September.
The ambitious capital club have added former United forward Nikita Parris to a squad which already contains world stars Kosovare Asllani, Saki Kumagai and Danielle van de Donk, and they’ll be aiming to claim our scalp in the 12:00 BST kick-off at The CopperJax Community Stadium.
CAIRO: Hamas negotiators in Cairo have received a new proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza, a Palestinian official said Monday, with the prime minister of key mediator Qatar also in Egypt to push for a truce.
Efforts by mediators Egypt and Qatar, along with the United States, have so far failed to secure a lasting ceasefire in the ongoing war, which over more than 22 months has created a dire humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said that the latest proposal from mediators “is a framework agreement to launch negotiations on a permanent ceasefire,” calling for an initial 60-day truce and hostage release in two batches.
The official said that “Hamas will hold internal consultations among its leadership” and with leaders of other Palestinian factions to review the text.
A source from Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant faction that has fought alongside Hamas in Gaza, told AFP that the plan involved a “ceasefire agreement lasting 60 days, during which 10 Israeli hostages would be released alive, along with a number of bodies.”
Out of 251 hostages taken during Hamas’s October 2023 attack that triggered the war, 49 are still held in Gaza including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
According to the Islamic Jihad source, “the remaining captives would be released in a second phase, with immediate negotiations to follow for a broader deal” for a permanent end to “the war and aggression” with international guarantees.
The source added that “all factions are supportive of what was presented” by the Egyptian and Qatari mediators.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, visiting the Rafah border crossing with Gaza on Monday, said that Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was visiting “to consolidate our existing common efforts in order to apply maximum pressure on the two sides to reach a deal as soon as possible.”
Alluding to the dire humanitarian conditions for the more than two million people living in the Gaza Strip, where UN agencies and aid groups have warned of famine, Abdelatty stressed the urgency of reaching an agreement.
“The current situation on the ground is beyond imagination,” he said.
On the ground, Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli strikes and gunfire across the territory killed at least 11 people on Monday.
AFP has contacted the Israeli military for comment.
Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties accessing swaths of the Palestinian territory mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defense agency or the Israeli military.
Rights group Amnesty International meanwhile accused Israel of enacting a “deliberate policy” of starvation in Gaza and “systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life.”
Israel, while heavily restricting aid allowed into the Gaza Strip, has repeatedly rejected claims of deliberate starvation.
Israel’s offensive has killed more than 61,944 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Gaza which the United Nations considers reliable.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio gives a media briefing during the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting at the Convention Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on July 11, 2025. — Reuters
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Washington continues to closely watch developments between Pakistan and India, even after the ceasefire that ended the recent deadly clashes.
The secretary of state pointed to the relations between Pakistan and India while discussing how fragile ceasefire arrangements can be, highlighting the difficulties of sustaining truce agreements in conflict zones.
Speaking in an interview on Sunday, Rubio noted: “Every single day we keep an eye on what’s happening between Pakistan and India, what’s happening between Cambodia and Thailand. Ceasefires can fall apart very quickly, especially after a three-and-a-half-year [Russia-Ukraine] war like what we’re facing now.”
He added that while Washington continues to push for a truce in Ukraine, lasting peace can only be ensured through a negotiated settlement rather than temporary halt in hostilities.
Earlier this year, Pakistan and India narrowly averted a dangerous escalation. On May 7, Indian forces carried out airstrikes on Pakistani territory under the guise of “Operation Sindoor,” an act of aggression strongly condemned by Islamabad.
In a swift and decisive response, Pakistan launched “Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos,” targeting multiple Indian military sites, downing six fighter jets — including three Rafales — and dozens of drones.
The confrontation, which lasted 87 hours, ended only after the United States intervened to broker a ceasefire. President Donald Trump later announced the truce on social media, crediting US diplomacy for defusing the crisis. While New Delhi sought to downplay Washington’s role, Pakistan openly acknowledged Trump’s efforts and even recommended him for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
Security sources have since revealed that India has launched “Operation Mahadev” — a covert campaign to stage fake encounters and frame illegally detained Pakistanis as cross-border militants in a bid to cover up its battlefield failures and suppress the Kashmiri freedom movement.
A software engineer from New York got so fed up with the irrelevant results and SEO spam in search engines that he decided to create a better one. Two months later, he has a demo search engine up and running. Here is how he did it, and four important insights about what he feels are the hurdles to creating a high-quality search engine.
One of the motives for creating a new search engine was the perception that mainstream search engines contained increasing amount of SEO spam. After two months the software engineer wrote about their creation:
“What’s great is the comparable lack of SEO spam.”
Neural Embeddings
The software engineer, Wilson Lin, decided that the best approach would be neural embeddings. He created a small-scale test to validate the approach and noted that the embeddings approach was successful.
Chunking Content
The next phase was how to process the data, like should it be divided into blocks of paragraphs or sentences? He decided that the sentence level was the most granular level that made sense because it enabled identifying the most relevant answer within a sentence while also enabling the creation of larger paragraph-level embedding units for context and semantic coherence.
But he still had problems with identifying context with indirect references that used words like “it” or “the” so he took an additional step in order to be able to better understand context:
“I trained a DistilBERT classifier model that would take a sentence and the preceding sentences, and label which one (if any) it depends upon in order to retain meaning. Therefore, when embedding a statement, I would follow the “chain” backwards to ensure all dependents were also provided in context.
This also had the benefit of labelling sentences that should never be matched, because they were not “leaf” sentences by themselves.”
Identifying The Main Content
A challenge for crawling was developing a way to ignore the non-content parts of a web page in order to index what Google calls the Main Content (MC). What made this challenging was the fact that all websites use different markup to signal the parts of a web page, and although he didn’t mention it, not all websites use semantic HTML, which would make it vastly easier for crawlers to identify where the main content is.
So he basically relied on HTML tags like the paragraph tag
to identify which parts of a web page contained the content and which parts did not.
This is the list of HTML tags he relied on to identify the main content:
blockquote – A quotation
dl – A description list (a list of descriptions or definitions)
ol – An ordered list (like a numbered list)
p – Paragraph element
pre – Preformatted text
table – The element for tabular data
ul – An unordered list (like bullet points)
Issues With Crawling
Crawling was another part that came with a multitude of problems to solve. For example, he discovered, to his surprise, that DNS resolution was a fairly frequent point of failure. The type of URL was another issue, where he had to block any URL from crawling that was not using the HTTPS protocol.
These were some of the challenges:
“They must have https: protocol, not ftp:, data:, javascript:, etc.
They must have a valid eTLD and hostname, and can’t have ports, usernames, or passwords.
Canonicalization is done to deduplicate. All components are percent-decoded then re-encoded with a minimal consistent charset. Query parameters are dropped or sorted. Origins are lowercased.
Some URLs are extremely long, and you can run into rare limits like HTTP headers and database index page sizes.
Some URLs also have strange characters that you wouldn’t think would be in a URL, but will get rejected downstream by systems like PostgreSQL and SQS.”
Storage
At first, Wilson chose Oracle Cloud because of the low cost of transferring data out (egress costs).
He explained:
“I initially chose Oracle Cloud for infra needs due to their very low egress costs with 10 TB free per month. As I’d store terabytes of data, this was a good reassurance that if I ever needed to move or export data (e.g. processing, backups), I wouldn’t have a hole in my wallet. Their compute was also far cheaper than other clouds, while still being a reliable major provider.”
But the Oracle Cloud solution ran into scaling issues. So he moved the project over to PostgreSQL, experienced a different set of technical issues, and eventually landed on RocksDB, which worked well.
He explained:
“I opted for a fixed set of 64 RocksDB shards, which simplified operations and client routing, while providing enough distribution capacity for the foreseeable future.
…At its peak, this system could ingest 200K writes per second across thousands of clients (crawlers, parsers, vectorizers). Each web page not only consisted of raw source HTML, but also normalized data, contextualized chunks, hundreds of high dimensional embeddings, and lots of metadata.”
GPU
Wilson used GPU-powered inference to generate semantic vector embeddings from crawled web content using transformer models. He initially used OpenAI embeddings via API, but that became expensive as the project scaled. He then switched to a self-hosted inference solution using GPUs from a company called Runpod.
He explained:
“In search of the most cost effective scalable solution, I discovered Runpod, who offer high performance-per-dollar GPUs like the RTX 4090 at far cheaper per-hour rates than AWS and Lambda. These were operated from tier 3 DCs with stable fast networking and lots of reliable compute capacity.”
Lack Of SEO Spam
The software engineer claimed that his search engine had less search spam and used the example of the query “best programming blogs” to illustrate his point. He also pointed out that his search engine could understand complex queries and gave the example of inputting an entire paragraph of content and discovering interesting articles about the topics in the paragraph.
Four Takeaways
Wilson listed many discoveries, but here are four that may be of interest to digital marketers and publishers interested in this journey of creating a search engine:
1. The Size Of The Index Is Important
One of the most important takeaways Wilson learned from two months of building a search engine is that the size of the search index is important because in his words, “coverage defines quality.” This is
2. Crawling And Filtering Are Hardest Problems
Although crawling as much content as possible is important for surfacing useful content, Wilson also learned that filtering low quality content was difficult because it required balancing the need for quantity against the pointlessness of crawling a seemingly endless web of useless or junk content. He discovered that a way of filtering out the useless content was necessary.
This is actually the problem that Sergey Brin and Larry Page solved with Page Rank. Page Rank modeled user behavior, the choice and votes of humans who validate web pages with links. Although Page Rank is nearly 30 years old, the underlying intuition remains so relevant today that the AI search engine Perplexity uses a modified version of it for its own search engine.
3. Limitations Of Small-Scale Search Engines
Another takeaway he discovered is that there are limits to how successful a small independent search engine can be. Wilson cited the inability to crawl the entire web as a constraint which creates coverage gaps.
4. Judging trust and authenticity at scale is complex
Automatically determining originality, accuracy, and quality across unstructured data is non-trivial
Wilson writes:
“Determining authenticity, trust, originality, accuracy, and quality automatically is not trivial. …if I started over I would put more emphasis on researching and developing this aspect first.
Infamously, search engines use thousands of signals on ranking and filtering pages, but I believe newer transformer-based approaches towards content evaluation and link analysis should be simpler, cost effective, and more accurate.”
Interested in trying the search engine? You can find it here and you can read how the full technical details of how he did it here.
MUNICH (Germany) – The countdown is on, as FIBA EuroBasket 2025 tips off in less than 10 days.
The reason why we’re all here again is because most of the rosters are taking shape, while the friendly games are being played all over the continent. That allows us to move the teams up or down in the Smart Power Rankings, again.
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#1 Serbia (0)
Never in doubt. Serbia are easily the most dominant team of the preparation period, and it looks like Svetislav Pesic is about to have a hard time cutting the list down to 12 names.
Nikola Jovic – nope, not Jokic, not a typo – was unstoppable against Germany just the other day, knocking down four triples for 22 points, so yeah, deal with it, he’s not a kid anymore, he’s ready to dominate right now.
One more game left for Pesic’s men, facing Slovenia in Belgrade on August 21.
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#2 Germany (0)
Gonna take a lot more than just one defeat to Serbia for us to push the FIBA Basketball World Cup winners down this list.
A debate for you, though. Is this still a Dennis Schroder team? Or is it now a Franz Wagner team?
We have the answer, based on our first-hand experiences next to Dennis and Franz and the rest of the Mannschaft. Don’t have to believe us, but we kinda know their answer would be something like:
We don’t care whose team it is, it’s not about the names on the back, it’s about the big name on the front of the jersey.
#3 France (0)
Give us a second to explain why we haven’t moved France up, despite their perfect record in both the FIBA EuroBasket 2025 Qualifiers and the friendly games played so far this summer, including home-and-away wins over the reigning FIBA EuroBasket champs Spain.
Firstly, it’s because Serbia and Germany looked equally as good. Secondly, it’s because of Vincent Poirier’s injury, which makes us kinda worried about their frontcourt, as it’s not just VP, it’s also VW*, RG** and ML*** missing this event after dominating the Olympic summer a year ago.
You better write it down – Lithuania are legit! We already told you this reminds us of their 2023 lineup which defeated the United States at the FIBA Basketball World Cup, and their results this summer are showing they are ready to fight for a medal, again.
They haven’t been on the podium since 2015. Latvia was hosting one of the groups then, too. Oh, and when they won it for the first time ever, back in 1937, you guessed it, Latvia was hosting, yep.
#5 Latvia (0)
Up-tempo basketball will be the main idea, there’s zero doubts when it comes to that. Points total in their first three friendly games of the summer:
166 vs Italy
214 vs Lithuania
188 vs Slovenia
It’s in their DNA now, they can’t and won’t stop running. Which is ironic, because their slow-motion videos look incredible on Instagram.
#6 Italy (+5)
Never again are we putting Italy out of the Top 10. These guys are 4-0 over the summer, winning all four games by double digits, in fact, defeating all of their opponents so easily, we can consider a 12-point win over Argentina as a close call.
It’s Simone Fontecchio who is clearly the leader of the team, but guys like Saliou Niang, Gabriele Procida and Momo Diouf have impressed, too.
Just a friendly reminder – all of them are in their early 20s.
Gives you more context when you’re assessing Italy’s results at U20s (won it), U18s (finished third) and U16s (finished fourth) this summer.
#7 Türkiye (-3)
Gonna need to see a bit more from you if we’re gonna keep you in the Top 5. Remember, we had them at #4 last time around, sparking debates about what’s wrong with us.
Nothing’s wrong, on paper they looked as good as anybody. On the court, they haven’t exactly transcribed those words into points, losing to Germany and Lithuania, defeating Czechia so far.
With all the others storming through, Lithuania and Italy especially, there was no way we keep them so close to the top. It can all change though, especially if they ruin the perfect Lithuanian run in Vilnius on Wednesday.
#8 Greece (-2)
Let us be clear: once Giannis Antetokounmpo plays – and we hope it’s going to be as soon as possible – you will not see a negative sign in those brackets next to Greece’s name.
Without him in the lineup, though, it was impossible to have a clear picture, and their 2-2 friendlies record offered us no help at all.
But with Giannis, against Latvia, Italy and France next week? Yeah, next edition of the Smart Power Rankings will tell you if the Greeks belong in the Top 5 here.
#9 Finland (+1)
You know who’ll be Giannis’ biggest rival in the battle for the top scorer’s honors? Lauri Markkanen.
Not much to add to this tweet, really.
#10 Slovenia (-3)
Down goes Luka, up go heart rates across Slovenia.
Actually across the world, if we’re being honest. Luka Doncic suffered a knock to his leg in the last friendly game, so let’s all collectively hold our breaths until he gets the green light from the medical team to go and light up the competition, again.
His injury is not the only concern for Slovenia, though, as they are yet to win a game this summer, 0-4 so far. That’s why they lost three spots here.
#11 Spain (-3)
Never.
That’s the answer when Spain were outside of the Top 10 in any Power Rankings in any competition in any sport in any edition.
But after back-to-back defeats to France and a number of notable absentees from the lineup, we just had to do it. Sorry. But we had to.
Potentially good news? Santi Aldama is looking better and he may be ready to return to the lineup. He’ll get them back to Top 10. Right?
Right.
#12 Israel (0)
Gonna keep them at 12, just because they were about to lose a few spots after their double digit defeat to Estonia, and gain a few with a double digit win over Greece.
Deni Avdija and Roman Sorkin scored 16 apiece in that win over Greece, proving that the frontcourt could be Israel’s strength this time around, after years and years of their guards and shooters leading the way on and off the court.
#13 Estonia (+3)
Run.
That’s what works for you, Estonia. Keep running and shooting, and if you get a game in the 80s or 90s, you’re probably winning, just like you did against Israel earlier this month (93-81).
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Two more games before tip-off in Group A for Estonia, but the problem is it’s against Sweden and Great Britain, so not at all the kind of profiles Estonia will see in Riga, Latvia.
However, a good chance to try and run again, because running could get the job done against Serbia or Türkiye or Latvia or Portugal or Czechia or all of them when the main event starts.
#14 Montenegro (+4)
Around the time we were wiping our tears because Nikola Vucevic is set to retire from the national team, Montenegro gave us a few clues as to what’s coming up this summer for them.
They can hold big named opponents to low scoring affairs, holding Greece to just 69 points, or playing a close one against France.
They can also score in bunches when it’s their day, scorching BIH with 102 points in Sarajevo nine days ago. Now it’s a matter of putting those two together, that physical defense with that scoring.
The sole potential of that happening sees us moving you up by four spots.
#15 Poland (-1)
And the winner of the Most Confounding Team of the Summer award* – Poland!
You think they are good? No, no, don’t do that, it’s like a curse, and they end up losing a superstar like Jeremy Sochan to an injury.
You think they’ll fall apart? No, no, don’t do that, either. Because they come back and play highly competitive basketball, ending up with a pair of wins in completely different games against Sweden and Georgia.
Again, a reminder they were in the Semi-Finals three years ago. Which is what makes them all the more confounding, too.
*Not an actual award.
#16 Georgia (-1)
Desert in philosophy is the condition of being deserving of something, whether good or bad. Good deeds will be rewarded, evil deeds punished, as simple as that.
It’s usually expressed in formulations: Thing X deserves Y in virtue of Z, according to Wikipedia, so Georgia (X) deserve to lose a spot in the Power Rankings (Y) because they lost all four games this summer (Z).
See, this is how deep the Power Rankings go. A bit of sports, geography, general trivia, and now, philosophy.
#17 Portugal (+4)
You know how much we talked about the big men from Group A? Well, Portugal seem ready for all the physicality, because Neemias Queta has got a high flying partner in Candido Sa.
They have been one of the feel-good topics of the summer, defeating Spain in Malaga, then getting back-to-back wins over Iceland and Sweden in Braga.
This could be the Cinderella story everybody loves so much.
#18 Bosnia and Herzegovina (-5)
Never a dull moment with BIH. They looked down and out, allowing 126 points against Serbia and 102 against Montenegro, with Dzanan Musa suffering an injury that leaves him questionable ahead of the main event.
And just as we were getting ready to push them down to the 20s here, they come back and win two straight against Great Britain (+30, too) and Belgium.
So while we are still bumping them down, take notice, because even if they aren’t through to the Round of 16, they’ll still be a fun team to follow when competition tips off in Cyprus.
#19 Belgium (-2)
Gonna be a long summer, huh?
Belgium are 1-4, including a -43 blowout against Finland, and a -13 defeat to these guys just above them in the Power Rankings.
It’s not looking good right now, but they still have a pair of games against BIH to show us something more than this.
#20 Czechia (0)
Make no mistake about it, Czechia can be a dangerous team due to their core’s longevity. They can be a dangerous team because they’ve got that man named Tomas Satoransky.
They can be a dangerous team because just four years ago, they were a contender for the Quarter-Finals of the Olympics in Japan.
But while they can be a dangerous team, they aren’t one right now. No wins across four games this summer.
#21 Sweden (+1)
You probably expected them a bit higher in the Power Rankings after they had defeated Poland in Poland to start the camp.
But you know the +1 here is very generous because they actually dropped three straight to Poland, Iceland and Portugal. Oh, Portugal -17, too.
The last time they won a FIBA EuroBasket game was back in 2013, so repeating that kind of result should be the starting point for Sweden.
#22 Iceland (+1)
Cry us a river, but we can’t move Iceland higher than #22, sorry. They did pick up one win so far this summer, but they lost three games, too.
They get one spot up because we see them competing and not giving up, as two of those defeats were by 2 and 4 points, respectively.
When they turn those kind of defeats into wins, the crying can stop and we’ll move them up to Top 20.
#23 Great Britain (-2)
Thank their 30-point defeat to BIH for the -2 you see in brackets up here.
Team GB is struggling, no wins in three games so far, even though they were hanging on against France earlier this month. No wins? Not a lot to talk about here, then.
#24 Cyprus (0)
You saw us say we’ll move Cyprus up if they pick up a win or two in the last Power Rankings.
That has not happened, not even close, 109-69 to Israel and 122-57 to Serbia. They’ve got a mountain to climb, but with defeats like those, it’s impossible to move them out of the last spot.
Note:The Power Rankings are entirely subjective and is in no way a true, accurate ranking system. All comments are purely those of the author.
Year-on-year diesel sales volume in July was down by a modest 23k units according to our figures – a better result for diesel than seen in June when a 50k loss was experienced.
To date in 2025, the decline in diesel car sales volume is 226k units, with a YTD diesel share of new car sales standing at 11.6% to July – just over three percentage points lower than the January to July 2024 figure. Year-to-date, Austria followed by Ireland and Germany have seen the largest percentage drops in diesel demand, but the downward trend remains relatively gentle as there is considerable consumer caution in many European markets over switching to BEV, meaning the ICE segment in general is only decaying slowly.
Source: GlobalData
The chart below shows just how resilient Germany’s diesel car market is compared with most others in the region. Its share of overall diesel cars sales was a steady 20% until the full impact of “Dieselgate” – the story of which broke in 2015 – hit the diesel market from 2017/18.
Source: GlobalData
While many markets started to turn their backs on diesel quite quickly after this point, its importance to both German OEMs and to German car buyers resulted in Germany’s share doubling within five years. That trend has continued to the present day and German car buyers now account for nearly 50% of all diesel car sales in the region.
Source: GlobalData
This article was first published on GlobalData’s dedicated research platform, the Automotive Intelligence Center.
“July brought Western European’s diesel car share to 12.2% – GlobalData” was originally created and published by Just Auto, a GlobalData owned brand.
The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
In one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers tracked over 148,000 people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to see if medication use was linked to changes in risks such as self-harm, substance misuse and crime.
The Swedish study published in The BMJ found that medication was associated with reduced rates of several serious outcomes.
ADHD prevalence, treatment and research gaps
ADHD affects ~5% of children and 2.5% of adults worldwide. It is most often diagnosed in childhood, but symptoms such as inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity can persist into adulthood. These symptoms can lead to problems beyond school or work performance. People with ADHD have higher rates of suicidal behavior, substance misuse, accidental injuries, transport accidents and criminal convictions compared with the general population.
Treatment can involve behavioral therapy, medication or both. Stimulants such as methylphenidate and amphetamines are often the first choice, with non-stimulants including atomoxetine or guanfacine used in some cases. Prescriptions for ADHD drugs have risen sharply worldwide, a rise that has fuelled debate about how effective these medications are in the long term – and whether their benefits extend beyond easing core symptoms.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) show that ADHD drugs help reduce symptoms. However, RCTs rarely measure broader outcomes such as reduced risk of self-harm or criminality. They also often exclude many people with ADHD seen in everyday clinics, meaning results may not represent the wider population. Observational studies using healthcare data have suggested possible wider benefits. Still, these studies can be biased if they only include people already affected by adverse events or fail to account for changes over time.
To address these gaps, researchers in Sweden conducted the first nationwide target trial emulation to test the effects of ADHD drug treatment on wider risks.
Target trial emulation
Target trial emulation is a research method that uses existing observational data to mimic the design and analysis of an RCT, aiming to reduce bias and produce results that are more comparable to trial findings.
Swedish researchers assessed the impact of ADHD medication using national data
The study used data from Swedish national registers collected between 2007 and 2020. Researchers identified 148,581 people aged 6–64 years with a new ADHD diagnosis. They compared two groups: those who began ADHD medication within three months of diagnosis and those who did not.
The trial emulation approach applied the principles of an RCT to real-world observational data, helping reduce bias. Participants were followed for up to two years after diagnosis. The team looked at five outcomes: suicidal behaviors, substance misuse, accidental injuries, transport accidents and criminality. They examined both first-time events and repeat events.
Methylphenidate was by far the most common starting drug, prescribed to 88.4% of people who began treatment.
For first events, ADHD medication was linked to lower rates of four outcomes: suicidal behaviors (17% lower), substance misuse (15% lower), transport accidents (12% lower) and criminality (13% lower).
For repeat events, reductions were seen across all five outcomes: suicidal behaviors (15% lower), substance misuse (25% lower), accidental injuries (4% lower), transport accidents (16% lower) and criminality (25% lower).
Benefits were greater in people who had already experienced these adverse events before diagnosis. Stimulant medications were linked to larger reductions than non-stimulants. Adults had greater reductions than youths for substance misuse and criminality, while females had a larger drop than males in first criminal convictions.
ADHD drug effects, study limits and future research
The findings suggest that ADHD medication may be linked to reductions in several serious risks, effects that were seen in both children and adults, and in males and females. While the study adds weight to guidelines that already place stimulant medication as a first-line option, the authors stress that these results are observational and cannot prove cause and effect. They may also contribute to ongoing discussions, such as whether methylphenidate should be included in the World Health Organization’s essential medicines list.
The study did not include information on behavioral or psychological treatments; therefore, the results compare medication use with “usual care” rather than with a placebo. Some people may not have taken their medication as prescribed, which could dilute the measured effect. The analysis also did not account for dosage differences or ADHD subtypes, and unmeasured factors such as severity of symptoms or lifestyle could still influence the results.
Future work could include long-term trials in more representative populations, assessing not just symptoms but a wider range of life outcomes. Studies that examine combined drug and non-drug approaches would also be valuable.
“It’s important to understand the risks and benefits of ADHD medication use, to give people informed choices about what they use to support themselves or their children,” Dr. Adam Guastella, an expert in mental health research and the Michael Crouch Chair in Child and Youth Mental Health at the University of Sydney, told the Science Media Centre.
“People can spend a long time seeking a diagnosis and discussing treatment, and the investment of time needs to be worth it and evidence-based. So, it’s important to understand the breadth of possible impact. It’s always helpful to know if medications can impact daily life beyond reducing symptoms. This information is also important for government, to help policy makers understand the potential benefits of treatment for broader society, such as mental health or criminal outcomes,” he added.
Reference: Zhang L, Zhu N, Sjölander A, et al. ADHD drug treatment and risk of suicidal behaviours, substance misuse, accidental injuries, transport accidents, and criminality: emulation of target trials. BMJ. 2025. doi: 10.1136/bmj-2024-083658
This article is a rework of a press release issued by BMJ Group.Material has been edited for length and content.
