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Scientists Study Barn Owls To Understand Why People With ADHD Struggle To Focus

Jon Hamilton Kids with ADHD are easily distracted. Barn owls are not. So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying these highly focused predatory birds in an effort to understand the brain circuits that control attention. The team's long-term goal is to figure out what goes wrong in the brains of people with attention problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "We think we have the beginnings of an answer," says Shreesh Mysore, an assistant professor who oversees the owl lab at Hopkins. The answer, he says, appears to involve an ancient brain area with special cells that tell us what to ignore. Mysore explains his hypothesis from one of the owl rooms in his basement lab. He has a distraught bird perched on his forearm. And as he talks, he tries to soothe the animal. The owl screeches, flaps and digs its talons into the elbow-length leather glove that Mysore wears for protection. He covers the bird's eyes with his free hand and hugs the animal to his chest. The owl, no longer able to focus on the movements of his human visitors, goes quiet. When it comes to paying attention, barn owls have a lot in common with people, Mysore says. "Essentially, a brain decides at any instant: What is the most important piece of information for behavior or survival?" he says. "And that is the piece of information that gets attended to, that drives behavior." © 2018 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 25441 - Posted: 09.12.2018

ADHD numbers are rising, and scientists are trying to understand why

By Rachel Bluth The number of children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has reached more than 10 percent, a significant increase during the past 20 years, according to a new study. The rise was most pronounced in minority groups, suggesting that better access to health insurance and mental-health treatment through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may have played some role in the increase. The rate of diagnosis doubled in girls, although it was still much lower than in boys. But the researchers say they found no evidence confirming frequent complaints that the condition is overdiagnosed or misdiagnosed. The United States has significantly more instances of ADHD than other developed countries, which researchers said has led some to think Americans are overdiagnosing children. Wei Bao, the lead author of the study, said in an interview that a review of studies around the world doesn’t support that. “I don’t think overdiagnosis is the main issue,” he said. Nonetheless, those doubts persist. Stephen Hinshaw, who co-authored a 2014 book called “The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money, and Today’s Push for Performance,” compared ADHD to depression. He said in an interview that neither condition has unequivocal biological markers, which makes it hard to determine whether a person has the condition. Symptoms of ADHD can include inattention, fidgety behavior and impulsivity. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25434 - Posted: 09.11.2018

Don’t be in any doubt – ADHD is an illness and it must be treated

Ann Robinson Imagine a neurological condition that affects one in 20 under-18s. It starts early, causes significant distress and pain to the child, damages families and limits the chances of leading a fulfilled life as an adult. One in 20 children are affected but only half of these will get a diagnosis and a fifth will receive treatment. If those stats related to a familiar and well-understood illness, such as asthma, there would be little debate about the need to improve intervention rates. But this is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and the outcry is muted. If anything, we hear warnings that too many children are being labelled this way, and too many given prescriptions. In the United States, ADHD is diagnosed at more than twice the incidence in Britain. The true prevalence is likely to be the same on both sides of the Atlantic. So what’s the story? Is the US too gung-ho, or is the UK dragging its heels? Are American doctors too quick to medicate children, or British doctors too slow? Emily Simonoff, co-author of a new meta-analysis in the journal the Lancet Psychiatry, says the problem in the UK is “predominantly about undermedication and underdiagnosis”. Her study examined a range of drug treatments compared to placebo, and it shows that methylphenidate (better known by under the brand name Ritalin) works best for children and amphetamines for adults. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 3: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Link ID: 25321 - Posted: 08.13.2018

Ritalin-type drugs best to treat ADHD in children, shows study

Sarah Boseley Health editor Ritalin and other drugs of the same class are the most effective and safest medications to prescribe for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a major scientific review. The review of ADHD drugs shows that they work, and work well, in spite of concerns among the public and some doctors that children in the UK are being overmedicated. Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, has likened the drugs to a “chemical cosh” and claimed they were being overprescribed, disguising bad behaviour among children that could be better dealt with. The authors of a major study in the Lancet Psychiatry journal say that methylphenidate, of which Ritalin is the best-known brand, is the most effective and best-tolerated treatment for children while amphetamines work best for adults. While the number of children on medication has risen as ADHD has become better understood, many do not get the treatment they need to cope in life and get through school, they said. The Guardian has revealed that getting help in the UK can take as long as two years. Emily Simonoff, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at King’s College London, one of the authors, said the perception that children were overmedicated was not accurate. “Clinicians are very cautious about using medication in this country,” she said. “The problem in the UK is predominantly about undermedication and underdiagnosis.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 25305 - Posted: 08.08.2018

When Medicines Affect a Child’s Mind and Behavior

By Perri Klass, M.D. Whenever I write about children getting medications for anxiety, for depression, or especially for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a certain number of readers respond with anger and suspicion, accusing me of being part of a conspiracy to medicate children for behaviors that are either part of the normal range of childhood or else the direct result of bad schools, bad environments or bad parenting. Others suggest that doctors who prescribe such medications are in the corrupt grip of the drug companies. And there are parents with stories of unexpected side effects and doctors who didn’t listen. (Of course, there are also parents who write to say that the right medication at the right moment really helped, or adults regretting that no one offered them something that might have helped back when they were struggling.) Putting children, especially young children, on psychotropic medications is scary for parents, sometimes scary for children and also, often, scary for the doctors who do the prescribing. As a pediatrician, I have often had occasion to be grateful to colleagues with more experience and training who could help a family figure out the right medication, dosing and follow-up. It is a big deal, and there are side effects to worry about and doctors should listen to families’ concerns. But when a child is suffering and struggling, families need help, and medications are often part of the discussion. And so, without presuming to judge what should be done for any specific child, I want to talk about the discussion that needs to take place around medicating a child in distress, and how the doctor and the family should monitor medications when they are prescribed. © 2018 The New York Times Company

More Screen Time For Teens Linked To ADHD Symptoms

Rhitu Chatterjee Most teens today own a smartphone and go online every day, and about a quarter of them use the internet "almost constantly," according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center. Now a study published Tuesday in JAMA suggests that such frequent use of digital media by adolescents might increase their odds of developing symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "It's one of the first studies to look at modern digital media and ADHD risk," says psychologist Adam Leventhal, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California and an author of the study. When considered with previous research showing that greater social media use is associated with depression in teens, the new study suggests that "excessive digital media use doesn't seem to be great for [their] mental health," he adds. Previous research has shown that watching television or playing video games on a console put teenagers at a slightly higher risk of developing ADHD behaviors. But less is known about the impact of computers, tablets and smartphones. Because these tools have evolved very rapidly, there's been little research into the impact of these new technologies on us, says Jenny Radesky, a pediatrician at the University of Michigan, who wrote an editorial about the new study for JAMA. Each new platform reaches millions of people worldwide in a matter of days or weeks, she says. "Angry Birds reached 50 million users within 35 days. Pokémon Go reached the same number in 19 days." © 2018 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 25220 - Posted: 07.18.2018

Arvid Carlsson, Who Discovered a Treatment for Parkinson’s, Dies at 95

By Denise Gellene Dr. Arvid Carlsson, a Swedish scientist whose discoveries about the brain led to the development of drugs for Parkinson’s disease and earned him a Nobel Prize, died on Friday. He was 95. His death was announced by the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, where he had been a professor of pharmacology. It did not say where he died. When Dr. Carlsson started his research in the 1950s, dopamine, a chemical in the brain, was thought to have little significance. Dr. Carlsson discovered that it was, in fact, an important neurotransmitter — a brain chemical that passes signals from one neuron to the next. He then found that dopamine was concentrated in the basal ganglia, the portion of the brain that controls movement. He showed that rabbits lost their ability to move after they were given a drug that lowered their dopamine stores; their mobility was restored after they received L-dopa, a drug that is converted into dopamine in the brain. Noting that the movement difficulties of his rabbits were similar to those of people with Parkinson’s disease, Dr. Carlsson proposed that the illness was related to a loss of dopamine. Other scientists confirmed that dopamine is depleted in people with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative condition that causes tremors and rigidity, and L-dopa soon became the standard treatment for the illness. Dr. Carlsson shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two American researchers, Dr. Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard, who made their own discoveries about the transmission of chemical signals in the brain. In awarding the Nobel, the Karolinska Institute of Sweden said the contributions of the three scientists were “crucial for an understanding of the normal function of the brain” and for how signal disturbances could “give rise to neurological and psychiatric disorders.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 25162 - Posted: 07.02.2018

‘Brain Performance’ Firm DeVos Invested in Is Hit for Misleading Claims

By Erica L. Green A “brain-performance” business backed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has agreed to stop advertising success rates for children and adults suffering from maladies such as attention deficit disorder, depression and autism after a review found the company could not support the outcomes it was promoting. The company, Neurocore, which has received more than $5 million from Ms. DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., to run “brain performance centers” in Michigan and Florida, lost an appeal before an advertising-industry review board, which found that the company’s claims of curbing and curing a range of afflictions without medication were based on mixed research and unscientific internal studies. The National Advertising Review Board, an oversight arm of the advertising industry’s self-regulatory body, announced its decision last week. Neurocore came under scrutiny during Ms. DeVos’s confirmation process, when she valued her stake in it at $5 million to $25 million. Ms. DeVos and her husband were chief investors, and she served on the company’s board of directors for seven years, until her nomination. The New York Times found that the company’s claims of treating disorders for more than 10,000 adults through “proven neurofeedback therapy” had been challenged by medical experts and insurance companies. After being nominated for education secretary, Ms. DeVos resigned from the board, but in an agreement with the Office of Government Ethics, retained her financial interest in Neurocore. The investment raised ethical concerns for Ms. DeVos after the company expressed hope that it could expand and help improve performance for students in schools. Ms. DeVos said she would “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter” concerning the company. But her family has continued to invest. Among the representatives of the company before the National Advertising Review Board was Jason Mahar, the in-house counsel for Windquest Group, the investment management firm of Ms. DeVos’s husband. Windquest also continues to promote the company on its website as part of its “corporate family.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 25151 - Posted: 06.28.2018

'Cutting Edge' Program For Children With Autism And ADHD Rests On Razor-Thin Evidence

Chris Benderev Stephanie and Natalie enrolled their older son in sessions at a Brain Balance Achievement Center in the hope that it would help him make friends. Hokyoung Kim for NPR Some parents see it coming. Natalie was not that kind of parent. Even after the director and a teacher at her older son's day care sat her down one afternoon in 2011 to detail the 3-year-old's difficulty socializing and his tendency to chatter endlessly about topics his peers showed no interest in, she still didn't get the message. Her son, the two educators eventually spelled out, might be on the autism spectrum. "I was in tears at the end," she says. "When I got home, I was just devastated." Natalie broke the news to her wife, Stephanie, whose mind fast-forwarded to a distressing future. Would her son — a squat, cheerful boy who, despite his affectionate nature, didn't have any playmates — ever be able to make friends? When a doctor eventually confirmed he had an autism spectrum disorder, the diagnosis came with a suggestion: Perhaps the boy would benefit from Prozac when he turned 7. "That was when both of us fell apart in that meeting," Natalie says. For both parents, medication wasn't an option. Article continues after sponsorship "Prozac is a very powerful drug for adults. Why would you give it to a 7-year-old?" Stephanie wondered after the doctor's visit. "I welled up with all of this emotion. And I said I will not let that happen." (To protect their privacy, we are only using Natalie's and Stephanie's first names. We are not naming their children.) The fear of psychotropic drugs led the family to pursue alternative treatments for autism. To start, they dropped gluten. © 2018 npr

Why the Medical Research Grant System Could Be Costing Us Great Ideas

By Aaron E. Carroll The medical research grant system in the United States, run through the National Institutes of Health, is intended to fund work that spurs innovation and fosters research careers. In many ways, it may be failing. It has been getting harder for researchers to obtain grant support. A study published in 2015 in JAMA showed that from 2004 to 2012, research funding in the United States increased only 0.8 percent year to year. It hasn’t kept up with the rate of inflation; officials say the N.I.H. has lost about 23 percent of its purchasing power in a recent 12-year span. Because the money available for research doesn’t go as far as it used to, it now takes longer for scientists to get funding. The average researcher with an M.D. is 45 years old (for a Ph.D. it’s 42 years old) before she or he obtains that first R01 (think “big” grant). Given that R01-level funding is necessary to obtain promotion and tenure (not to mention its role in the science itself), this means that more promising researchers are washing out than ever before. Only about 20 percent of postdoctoral candidates who aim to earn a tenured position in a university achieve that goal. This new reality can be justified only if those who are weeded out really aren’t as good as those who remain. Are we sure that those who make it are better than those who don’t? A recent study suggests the grant-making system may be unreliable in distinguishing between grants that are funded versus those that get nothing — its very purpose. When a health researcher (like me) believes he has a good idea for a research study, he most often submits a proposal to the N.I.H. It’s not easy to do so. Grants are hard to write, take a lot of time, and require a lot of experience to obtain. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 25097 - Posted: 06.18.2018

Kids Are Taking Fewer Antibiotics, More ADHD Meds

Richard Harris Children and adolescents are getting fewer prescription drugs than they did in years past, according to a study that looks at a cross-section of the American population. "The decrease in antibiotic use is really what's driving this overall decline in prescription medication use that we're seeing in children and adolescents," says Craig Hales, a preventive medicine physician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics and lead author of a study published Tuesday in JAMA. Hales says that's a good thing. "Thirty percent of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary and potentially dangerous," he says. They're often given for colds and other viral infections, where they are useless. And they may have side effects. Antibiotic overuse also increases the risk that these drugs lose their curative powers. The study is based on data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study, which included more than 38,000 children and adolescents. The study compared prescription drug use from 1999 to 2002 with prescriptions given in 2011 to 2014, the last period for which data were available. Overall, the proportion of children and teenagers getting prescriptions dropped from about 25 percent to 22 percent. Prescriptions for some drugs increased, such as for treatments for asthma, contraception and attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The survey also noted a large gap in prescription use among children and adolescents who were insured versus those who weren't. Some 23 percent of insured youth had recently taken a prescription of some sort, compared with 10 percent of those who were uninsured. © 2018 npr

Brain abnormalities found in 4- and 5-year-olds with ADHD

by Amy Ellis Nutt In the first comprehensive imaging study of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in preschoolers, researchers have found evidence that structural changes in the brain are already recognizable at the age of 4. “One of our big questions was thinking about an early-onset disorder and linking it to early-onset brain anomalies,” said Lisa Jacobson, one of the researchers involved in the study, which appeared Monday in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society. The results “tell us that this is not just a behavioral disorder. It is a neurological disorder.” The study found widespread reductions in the volume of gray matter in the brains of children with ADHD. And the more severe their behavior, the more their brains differed from those of children who were not diagnosed with ADHD, according to Jacobson, a pediatric neuropsychologist at Johns Hopkins University and the Kennedy Krieger Institute, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins and the site of the research. The most significant differences in brain volume were seen in the temporal and prefrontal lobes, including areas associated with activity, attention and motor control. The results seen in the preschoolers mirror those of earlier research in school-age children and adolescents. “When they designed the study, even [lead author] Mark Mahone did not think he would find these differences,” said James Griffin of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the research. Griffin is the deputy chief of NIH’s Child Development and Behavior branch. “They were surprised at how early these differences were already evident in the brain.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

In Praise of A.D.H.D.

By LEONARD MLODINOW Ten years ago, when my son Nicolai was 11, his doctor wanted to put him on medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It would make him less wild,” I explained to my mother, who was then 85. “It would slow him down a bit.” My mother grumbled. “Look around you,” she said in Yiddish. “Look how fast the world is changing. He doesn’t need to slow down. You need to speed up.” It was a surprising recommendation from someone who had never learned to use a microwave. But recent research suggests she had a point: Some people with A.D.H.D. may be naturally suited to our turbocharged world. Today the word “hyperactive” doesn’t just describe certain individuals; it also is a quality of our society. We are bombarded each day by four times the number of words we encountered daily when my mother was raising me. Even vacations are complicated — people today use, on average, 26 websites to plan one. Attitudes and habits are changing so fast that you can identify “generational” differences in people just a few years apart: Simply by analyzing daily cellphone communication patterns, researchers have been able to guess the age of someone under 60 to within about five years either way with 80 percent accuracy. To thrive in this frenetic world, certain cognitive tendencies are useful: to embrace novelty, to absorb a wide variety of information, to generate new ideas. The possibility that such characteristics might be associated with A.D.H.D. was first examined in the 1990s. The educational psychologist Bonnie Cramond, for example, tested a group of children in Louisiana who had been determined to have A.D.H.D. and found that an astonishingly high number — 32 percent — did well enough to qualify for an elite creative scholars program in the Louisiana schools. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 24766 - Posted: 03.19.2018

Decoding the Overlap between Autism and ADHD

By Ricki Rusting, Every morning, Avigael Wodinsky sets a timer to keep her 12-year-old son, Naftali, on track while he gets dressed for school. “Otherwise,” she says, “he’ll find 57 other things to do on the way to the bathroom.” Wodinsky says she knew something was different about Naftali from the time he was born, long before his autism diagnosis at 15 months. He lagged behind his twin sister in hitting developmental milestones, and he seemed distant. “When he was an infant and he was feeding, he wouldn’t cry if you took the bottle away from him,” she says. He often sat facing the corner, turning the pages of a picture book over and over again. Although he has above-average intelligence, he did not speak much until he was 4, and even then his speech was often ‘scripted:’ He would repeat phrases and sentences he had heard on television. Naftali’s trouble with maintaining focus became apparent in preschool—and problematic in kindergarten. He would stare out the window or wander around the classroom. “He was doing everything except what he was supposed to be doing,” Wodinsky recalls. At first, his psychiatrist credited these behaviors to his autism and recommended he drink coffee for its mild stimulant effect. The psychiatrist also suggested anxiety drugs. Neither treatment helped. A doctor then prescribed a series of drugs used for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), even though Naftali’s hyperactivity was still considered a part of his autism; those medications also failed or caused intolerable side effects. © 2018 Scientific American

This Video Game May Help Kids with ADHD

By Rebecca Robbins, Akili Interactive Labs on Monday reported that its late-stage study of a video game designed to treat kids with ADHD met its primary goal, a big step in the Boston company’s quest to get approval for what it hopes will be the first prescription video game. In a study of 348 children between the ages of 8 and 12 diagnosed with ADHD, those who played Akili’s action-packed game on a tablet over four weeks saw statistically significant improvements on metrics of attention and inhibitory control, compared to children who were given a different action-driven video game designed as a placebo. The company plans next year to file for approval with the Food and Drug Administration. “We are directly targeting the key neurological pathways that control attention and impulsivity,” said Akili CEO Eddie Martucci. The study “was meant to be a strong objective test to ask: Is it the targeting we do in the brain or is it general engagement with a treatment that’s exciting and interesting … that actually leads to these targeted effects? And so I think we clearly see that it’s the targeted algorithms that we have.” Despite the positive results, questions about the product remain. For instance, parents and physicians subjectively perceived about the same amount of improvement in children’s behavior whether they were playing the placebo game or the therapeutic game. And if Akili can get approval, it remains to be seen whether clinicians and insurers will embrace its product. The video game has not been tested head-to-head against ADHD medications or psychotherapy to see if it’s equally effective. © 2017 Scientific American

Does an A.D.H.D. Link Mean Tylenol Is Unsafe in Pregnancy?

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. We can date our pregnancies by what we were told was safe that later turned out to be more problematic. My own mother often told me lovingly (and laughingly) of the understanding doctor who advised her to drink rum every night when she was pregnant with me and had trouble falling asleep. And we know that on balance, it’s a good thing that science and epidemiology march forward, with more careful and more thorough investigations of the possible effects of exposures during fetal development and their complex long-term implications. But it’s disconcerting to learn that something you did, or something you took, in all good faith, following all the best recommendations, may be part of a more complicated story. And the researchers who have been examining the possible effects of fairly extensive acetaminophen use during pregnancy are very well aware that these are complex issues to communicate to women who have been pregnant in the past, who are pregnant right now or who become pregnant in the future. Acetaminophen, found in Tylenol and many other over-the-counter products, has been the drug recommended for pregnant women with fever or pain or inflammatory conditions certainly as far back as my own pregnancies in the 1980s and ‘90s. But in recent years there have been concerns raised about possible effects of heavy use of acetaminophen on the brain of the developing fetus. A Danish epidemiological study published in 2014 found an association between prenatal acetaminophen use during pregnancy and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, especially if the acetaminophen use was more frequent. Zeyan Liew, a postdoctoral scholar in the department of epidemiology at the U.C.L.A. Fielding School of Public Health, who was the first author on the 2014 article, said it was challenging for researchers to look at effects that show up later in the child’s life. “With a lot of drug safety research in pregnancy, they only look into birth outcomes or congenital malformations,” Dr. Liew said. “It’s very difficult to conduct a longitudinal study and examine outcomes like neurobehavioral disorders.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

New Study Casts Doubt on Diagnosis of Adult-Onset A.D.H.D.

By BENEDICT CAREY In just the past few years, researchers have identified what they believe is an adult version of attention deficit disorder: a restless inability to concentrate that develops spontaneously after high school, years after the syndrome typically shows itself, and without any early signs. The proposed diagnosis — called adult-onset A.D.H.D. and potentially applicable to millions of people in their late teens or older — is distinct from the usual adult variety, in which symptoms linger from childhood. Yet a new study suggests that adult-onset A.D.H.D. is rare — if it exists at all. The paper, published Friday in the American Journal of Psychiatry, could deepen the debate over these symptoms rather than settle it. Previously, three large analyses had estimated the prevalence of the disorder at 3 to 10 percent of adults. The new study, while smaller, mined more extensive medical histories than earlier work and found that most apparent cases of adult-onset attention deficits are likely the result of substance abuse or mood problems. “This study carefully considered whether each person met criteria for A.D.H.D. and also fully considered other disorders” that might better explain the symptoms, said Mary Solanto, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. “In all those respects, it is the most thorough study we have looking at this issue.” Dr. Solanto said the study all but ruled out adult-onset A.D.H.D. as a stand-alone diagnosis. Other experts cautioned that it was too early to say definitively, and noted that attention deficits often precede mood and substance abuse problems — which in turn can mask the condition. The new analysis drew on data from a decades-long study of childhood A.D.H.D. that had tracked youngsters from age 9 or 10 up through early adulthood, gathering detailed histories from multiple sources, including doctors and parents. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 24223 - Posted: 10.20.2017

Children with ADHD move twice as much when learning

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may fidget, tap and swivel around in a chair much more than normally developing children because it helps them to learn complex material, psychologists have found. ADHD is often perceived as a behavioural problem because it can result in symptoms such as inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity that can affect social interaction and learning. Scientists increasingly recognize ADHD as a brain disorder that affects about five per cent of the school-age population. Now brain tests show children with ADHD tend to learn less when sitting still compared to when they're moving. It is not for lack of motivation, says Prof. Mark Rapport, a child psychopathology researcher who focuses on ADHD at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Rapport and his colleagues set out to test an observation made by many parents — that children with ADHD can pay attention if they are doing an activity they enjoy. They put 32 boys aged eight to 12 with ADHD and 30 of their peers who are not affected by the disorder through a battery of memory and other tests. Participants watched two videos on separate days: an instructional math lesson without performing the calculations, and a scene from Star Wars Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace. During the Star Wars movie, the boys with ADHD did not squirm more than other children, but when asked to concentrate on the math lesson, there was a difference between the two groups. "All children and all people in general, moved more when they were engaged in a working memory task. Kids with ADHD move about twice as much under the same conditions," Rapport said. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Could ADHD be a type of sleep disorder?

By Ariana Eunjung Cha Over the past two decades, U.S. parents and teachers have reported epidemic levels of children with trouble focusing, impulsive behavior and so much energy that they are bouncing off walls. Educators, policymakers and scientists have referred to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, as a national crisis and have spent billions of dollars looking into its cause. They've looked at genetics, brain development, exposure to lead, the push for early academics, and many other factors. But what if the answer to at least some cases of ADHD is more obvious? What if, as a growing number of researchers are proposing, many kids today simply aren't getting the sleep they need, leading to challenging behaviors that mimic ADHD? That provocative and controversial theory has been gaining momentum in recent years, with several studies suggesting strong links between ADHD and the length, timing and quality of sleep. In an era in which even toddlers know the words Netflix and Hulu, when demands for perfectionism extend to squirmy preschoolers and many elementary-age students juggle multiple extracurricular activities each day, one question is whether some kids are so stimulated or stressed that they are unable to sleep as much or as well as they should. Growing evidence suggests that a segment of children with ADHD are misdiagnosed and actually suffer from insufficient sleep, insomnia, obstructed breathing or another known sleep disorder. But the most paradigm-challenging idea may be that ADHD may itself be a sleep disorder. If correct, this idea could fundamentally change the way ADHD is studied and treated. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 24092 - Posted: 09.21.2017

Adderall might improve your test scores – but so could a placebo

By Sam Wong Students who take Adderall to improve their test scores may get a slight benefit, but it’s mainly a placebo effect. The drug Adderall is a combination of the stimulants amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, and is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But it’s growing in popularity as a study drug in the US, where around a third of college students are thought to try using prescription stimulants for non-medical reasons. But does it work? Rachel Fargason, a psychiatrist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, says the idea of stimulants as cognitive enhancers didn’t tally with her experience of patients who were diagnosed incorrectly. “If they didn’t have ADHD, the stimulants generally didn’t help them cognitively,” she says. To investigate further, Fargason’s team set up a trial in 32 people between the ages of 19 and 30, none of whom had ADHD. Each participant took a batch of cognitive tests four times. On two of these occasions they were given 10 milligrams of Adderall, while they were given a placebo the other times. With each treatment, they were once told they were getting medication, and once told they were getting a placebo. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

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