Biomedical subjects
Zdenek Matejcek
Publications and source records attributed to Zdenek Matejcek.
Born unwanted. Observations from the Prague Study.
The authors followed 220 children born in 1961-1963 to women twice denied abortion for the same pregnancy in Prague (Czech Republic) and 220 pair-matched controls, whose mothers were pair-matched for age and socioeconomic status and the partner's presence in the home. They were medically, psychologically, and socially assessed at ages 9, 14-16, 21-23, 30, and 35. Although differences in psychosocial development between the unwanted study participants and pair-matched controls were not dramatic and changed over time, the differences were consistently in disfavor of the unwanted pregnancy participants. When siblings were used as controls, the findings supported the hypothesis that being born from an unwanted pregnancy is a risk factor for poor mental health in adulthood.
Is ADHD adaptive or non-adaptive behavior?
The evolutionary approach to the issue of ADHD derives from the assumption that what is regarded as a pathological phenomenon today was once an adaptive response to the conditions of life in the ancestral stages of human development. The paper argues against this conception on the basis of the clinical picture of ADHD. The author believes that in the previous "natural" conditions the ADHD syndrome was even more of a maladaptation than in the "protective" conditions of present-day life.