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Recent ADHD News as of Jul 29, 2010
ADHD meds help, but many parents still against them
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:58:06 - Pacific Time
Medication may be the most effective treatment for kids with ADHD but it’s not a cure-all, a new Consumer Reports survey shows. Parents surveyed by the magazine reported using a variety of strategies to improve their kids’ symptoms, such as hiring tutors, switching schools, modifying diets, and changing the way they spoke to their children. The results are good news, says Dr. Orly Avitzur, a neurologist and medical adviser to the magazine. Kids improve the most when medication is coupled with complementary approaches, such as behavioral therapy and strategies to help with academics. Consumer Reports interviewed 934 parents of children with ADHD, asking about a variety of topics, ranging from the impact of medications to the effect of complementary strategies, to which physicians provided the most help. Most families - 84 percent - tried medication at some point, with 67 percent reporting that the drugs helped "a lot”" In general, kids who got a prescription for ADHD were older: The average age of children who had tried medication was 13. Another strategy that got good marks was switching a child to a school that was better suited to handle ADHD. A full 45 percent of the parents who tried this approach said the switch helped "a lot." A similar strategy, hiring a tutor, got thumbs up from 37 percent of the parents who tried it. Parents also reported changing the way they interacted with their children. Some started giving their kids only one instruction at a time - that helped "a lot" for 39 percent of the parents who tried it. Read More...
Vyvanse effective for teens with ADHD
Fri, 28 May 2010 04:20:17 - Pacific Time
The stimulant drug Vyvanse improves attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adolescents beginning as early as the first week of treatment, according to a new study. "We saw a 50 percent improvement in symptoms" compared with placebo, Dr. Ann Childress told Reuters Health. Childress presented her group's findings this week at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting in New Orleans. "Vyvanse improved symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity compared to placebo," she noted. Vyvanse is currently approved in the US for treatment of ADHD in children aged 6 to 12 years and in adults. The 45-center randomized trial involved 309 subjects 13 to 17 years of age with at least moderate symptoms of ADHD. The research team assigned 77 teenagers to the placebo group and the remaining 232 to Vyvanse at 30, 50, or 70 milligrams per day for 4 weeks. Significant between-group differences, favoring Vyvanse, became evident within the first week and persisted throughout the study. Nearly twice as many subjects in the Vyvanse groups were rated as very much or much improved at the end of the study. There were no surprises regarding side effects, said Childress, who is from the Center for Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine in Las Vegas. "We had all the 'usual suspects,'" including decreased appetite, headache, insomnia, weight decrease, and irritability. The researchers also saw small average increases in pulse and blood pressure with Vyvanse. Vyvanse maker Shire Plc recently submitted a supplemental New Drug Application for use of Vyvanse in the treatment of adolescents aged 13 to 17 years with ADHD. Read More...
Can Pesticides Cause ADHD?
Mon, 17 May 2010 06:47:04 - Pacific Time
A study published in the Journal of Pediatrics says that one type of pesticide commonly used on fruits and vegetables may be contributing to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. Researchers took urine from over 1,000 participants ages 8 to 15 and analyzed it for pesticides. 119 of the children had symptoms of ADHD. Those with the highest concentration of pesticides were more likely to have the disorder, according to the study. "It's consistent with other studies that have looked at organophosphate pesticides and have found that exposure of children to organophosphates in early life can cause brain injury. This study builds on those other studies," said Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. While some doctors are taking this study seriously, they say additional research is still needed to confirm a connection to pesticides. Still, the study's researchers claim even tiny amounts of pesticides may affect brain chemistry in children. The researchers claim the chemicals can have harmful effects on development, including behavioral problems and the ability to think and communicate. "This study only provides a snapshot of one point in time of the association between pesticides and ADHD," Landrigan said. "The next step is we need to do a prospective study, a study that measures pesticide exposure very early in life ... then follow the children over five, six, seven years and see if the early exposure actually causes the disease." Experts also warn any number of other factors could cause ADHD. "There is no need here to panic. What we're talking about here is giving people info that will empower them to be educated consumers," Landrigan said. Read More...
ADHD Linked to Interaction of Genetics and Psychology
Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:58:49 - Pacific Time
The high heritability seen in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may support genotype-environment interactions for the disorder. A new study supports this line of thinking by finding an association between ADHD and a specific serotonin gene variant in the presence of family discourse. The results suggest that "both high and low serotonergic activity may exert risk for ADHD when coupled with psychosocial distress such as children's self-blame in relation to inter-parental conflict," Molly Nikolas, MA, of the Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, and colleagues write in a report published online April 16 in Behavioral and Brain Functions. It is hypothesized that serotonin genes play a role in the etiology of ADHD and may interact with psychosocial stressors in ADHD. To further investigate serotonin genotype-environment interactions in ADHD, the researchers studied 304 boys and girls aged 6 to 18 years — 151 with ADHD and 137 without ADHD. Study participants completed the Children's Perception of Inter-Parental Conflict scale. The trialleic configuration of the key serotonin genetic region 5HTTLPR (long/short polymorphism with A > G substitution) was genotyped, and participants were assigned as having high (n = 78), intermediate (n = 137), or low (n = 89) serotonin transporter activity genotypes. According to the investigators, "a significant and positive relationship" between self-blame and ADHD emerged for those with the high and low serotonergic 5THHLPR genotypes (P < .001). In contrast, there was no relation between self-blame and ADHD for those with the intermediate activity 5HTTLPR genotypes. Children and adolescents with the intermediate activity genotype "appeared to be immune to whatever effects self-blame was having on hyperactivity/impulsivity," the investigators report. "Overall," the investigators say, "these results complement growing evidence suggesting that 5HTTLPR confers liability for ADHD that is activated in particular environments, rather than conferring risk for ADHD directly." Read More...
Pill Popping Kids of America
Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:32:38 - Pacific Time
Putting children with behavioral conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) on prescription drugs is rife in the US. In his latest documentary, Louis Theroux traveled to the Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a leading center in the treatment of children with mental health problems, to meet the kids, the families and the doctors who believe medication is the only way to tackle their conditions. It is estimated that between five to eight per cent of all American school children have been diagnosed with ADHD. In the UK the figure is 500,000, with around 60,000 of those taking medication. Louis Theroux: America's Medicated Kids, is on BBC2 at 9pm on Sunday. Here, Louis, 39 - who has two sons aged four and two - gives TV Features Writer Kate Jackson his verdict on the issue. The original title for the documentary was Medicalised Normality, with the idea that we're creating these medical categories for things that would have been considered normal in the old days. Now you're not naughty, you're oppositional defiant. You're not fidgety, you've got ADHD. The author was one of these people who thought ADHD was just a technical word for a kid who couldn't sit still. But there are kids who are really being helped by having that diagnosis. There are adults who dropped out of school because they couldn't sit still, and they wish they had been diagnosed with ADHD instead of just being considered a problem child. Having been to Pittsburgh and seen how much the parents believe in the drugs - and how much of a difference it has made in their lives - the issue of medication is much less clear-cut in the author's mind. And as a parent, the idea of medicating a kid is off-putting. But none of these parents was rushing to put their kids on drugs. It was more that the doctors were advising it and the parents were at their wits' end. It would be a very difficult decision and you would have to weigh up where the kid was at and how extreme his or her behavior was getting. Read More...
Synergy between behavioural and pharmacologic interventions for ADHD
Wed, 7 Apr 2010 07:55:54 - Pacific Time
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common mental health disorders affecting children and adolescents. Children with ADHD are excessively restless, impulsive, and distractible and experience difficulties at home and in school. Problems inhibiting behaviour are a common theme for ADHD symptoms. These symptoms are usually treated with stimulant medications, behavioural approaches or a combination of the two. In a new study appearing in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, researchers compared children with ADHD and typically developing children using a video-game task, which required them to focus their attention and to control impulsive actions. The children performed this task under three different motivational conditions, and the children with ADHD were tested both on and off their usual dose of medication. This allowed the researchers to compare the effects of both medication and motivation on the children's response inhibition. Dr Madeleine Groom, corresponding author of the study and Professor Chris Hollis, principal investigator, explained their findings: 'We found that brain electrical activity in children with ADHD when attending to the task and restraining impulsive responses differed from a comparison group of children without ADHD, but became more similar when they took stimulant medication. Intriguingly, rewards and penalties given to improve task performance also changed brain activity, and did so in both children with ADHD and in the control group, although these motivational effects were much smaller than those associated with medication.' These findings suggest that stimulant medication tends to normalise brain function in children with ADHD and enables them to better maintain attention and restrain impulsive responses. Motivational incentives also seem to play a role in modulating similar neural circuits and work additively with medication to improve performance in children with ADHD. Read More...
ADHD Symptoms Often Subside Within a Year
Mon, 5 Apr 2010 07:11:53 - Pacific Time
Children identified with an attention-deficit problem should be re-evaluated annually because symptoms often subside from one year to the next, researchers say. The study authors looked at three groups of elementary school-age children: 27 first-graders and 24 fourth-graders who appeared to have trouble paying attention but weren't diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and 28 kids in grades one through four who had been diagnosed with ADHD. Teachers ranked the inattention levels of the students about once a year. The findings were published in the March 17 online edition of the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. According to the researchers, scores of highly inattentive behavior declined for most children and fell to normal ranges for 25 percent to 50 percent of them. About one-third of kids showed no signs of an attention problem the year after they were thought to show at least six symptoms of ADHD. The study authors pointed out that it is possible that attention problems could be the result of factors other than the child himself or herself. Poor organization in a classroom or disruptive classmates could cause attention problems instead, they suggested. Rechecking symptoms could prevent unneeded treatment for ADHD, they concluded. Read More...
Commonly Used ADHD Medicines Questioned by Study
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:51:41 - Pacific Time
A recent Australian study has managed to reveal a "significant lack of effect" of some of the most commonly used medicines to treat ADHD, and this has become a finding which has surprised many experts, including one of the researchers involved. Co-author of the WA-based research, which analyzed the effectiveness of drugs now used almost everywhere to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in kids, Professor Lou Landau has been much shocked by the revelations of the study. The Chief Medical Adviser to the West Australian Department of Health stressed that he was not expecting such a strongly negative result. "Yes, we weren't anticipating that significant effect... or the significant lack of effect of the medication", he said. For the sake of study, researchers’ analyzed data collected from the country's long-term Raine Study to assess the health, and other, outcomes of 131 children with ADHD, in over 2,800 Australian families. It revealed how those on traditional ADHD drugs, like as Ritalin and dexamphetamine, displayed poorer educational outcomes, thanchildren with ADHD not on the medicines. The WA Government released the report on Wednesday. Read More...
ADHD Brain May Be a Little Different
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:24:38 - Pacific Time
A link appears to exist between attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anomalies in the brain's reward system, a new study suggests. Spanish researchers used MRI to scan the brains of 42 children with ADHD and 42 other children with no signs of ADHD and found that the ventral striatum was smaller, particularly on the right side, in those with ADHD. The ventral striatum includes the nucleus accumbens, which maintains levels of motivation when a person starts a task and continues to maintain motivation until the task is completed. The reduced size of the ventral striatum in children with ADHD was associated with symptoms of hyperactivity and impulsiveness, the researchers said. The study was published recently in the journal Biological Psychiatry. These findings support results from previous studies in animals in which researchers identified an association between the nucleus accumbens, impulsive behavior and hyperactivity. The researchers said it appears that ADHD is not only caused by brain alterations that affect cognitive processes, but also by brain irregularities that cause problems with motivation. Read More...
News Archive
New study links phthalates to ADHD: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:17:14 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Disconnect Between Brain Regions in ADHD: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:30:12 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Seizure drug limits aggression in kids with ADHD: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:51:34 - Pacific Time: Read More...
St John's Wort Ineffective for ADHD: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 06:07:10 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Drugs not best option for ADHD: report: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:18:40 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Common Plastic Chemical Linked To ADHD: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:03:17 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Startled Flies May Provide Insight Into ADHD: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:25:14 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Passive smoke causes ADHD in kids: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:21:43 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Exposure to smoke, lead ups risk of ADHD: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:19:34 - Pacific Time: Read More...
Australian study on genetics of ADHD: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:06:03 - Pacific Time: Read More...
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