Does AD(H)D exist?

[gib65]

I'm in a debate with someone on another forum about whether AD(H)D actually exists. He thinks it doesn't. I argued a point with him that studies have shown that those with AD(H)D are statistically more likely to have smaller right frontal lobes than "normal" people. He countered that with studies that show that ritalin and other amphetamines cause shrinkage in the right frontal lobe (implying that the small frontal lobes in AD(H)D people weren't actually small before medication).

 

I want to know, first, if this is right, and second, if he's right in thinking that there are no neurological differences between AD(H)D people and "normal" people.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

If you happen to know where or when these studies were published (journal name, etc.), I'd be able to look them up using my university library access and see if the studies say anything about the medications given to the patients.

 

So if you have a link to a news article about the studies, and it names a journal, I can look up the studies for you.

[Genecks]

I'm sorry. What was the question?

 

I would love to see the studies that discuss shrinkage of the brain after usage of ritalin.

 

About the only drastic thing I've heard about ritalin (I have no source) is that it can cause developmental issues in a child's sexual drive, thus making the child indifferent to sexual desire ("decrease in sexual drive"). It was quite some time ago I heard about this.

 

I think there is/are a/some genes that influences people to not pay attention, talk to squirrels and chase bunnies, and deem Boxxy as their queen.

Edited December 20, 2009 by Genecks

[gib65]

If you happen to know where or when these studies were published (journal name, etc.), I'd be able to look them up using my university library access and see if the studies say anything about the medications given to the patients.

 

So if you have a link to a news article about the studies, and it names a journal, I can look up the studies for you.

 

Sorry, that was years ago. I have no idea what article it was. I can ask the guy I'm arguing with for his sources.

[Genecks]

That's typically one of the few things of discourse/argumentation during public discussion (a person at least state the author or the work). Otherwise, you could simply say the person is talking nonsense and put a UAG to all of it.

[jake.com]

deem Boxxy as their queen.

 

you dont need ritalin to do that ._.

[futrethink]

---gib65.

 

---Here is a question for your friend, “If an adult checked their medical records and found all evidence pointing to the exact same physical characteristics of AD(H)D, with their past and present physical and mental activities following the same and have had no medication to alter/create this ‘problem’, is it all in everyone’s imagination or caused by drugs?”

 

---I’ve copied and pasted the following directly from this google search: http://www.google.ca/search?q=adhd+smaller+frontal+lobes%2C+studies&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Search for the headline: Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Diagnostic Criteria The reason for doing this is because, if I set up the link directly to the site, it is blocked due to a requirement of logging in as a medscape member, so I don't know how long the article and link will be easily found on the first page.

---Clicking on the links, on the site in the article, will give you the references and studies connected with the information.

 

Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Diagnostic Criteria , Authors and Disclosures, Kytja K. S. Voeller , MD , Western Institute for Neurodevelopmental Studies and Interventions, Boulder, CO.

 

Neuroanatomy and Physiology of ADHD

Behaviorally, ADHD is a disorder of self-regulation, which implicates some sort of dysfunction of the frontal-subcortical system.[34,37-39] Many magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) morphometric studies (ie, studies involving measurements of various brain regions) have been conducted using different techniques and different populations (including subjects from different regions of the globe). These studies have identified relatively consistent differences in the brains of children with ADHD compared with those of normal controls. A large, well-designed longitudinal study involving 544 MRIs from children with ADHD and age- and sex-matched controls has provided evidence that ADHD is associated with an atypical pattern of brain development that appears in early childhood.[40] The major findings of these studies are summarized as follows:

 

__1.____Total cerebral volume is smaller in individuals with ADHD and in controls. There is a small but significant reduction (on the order of 5%) in mean total cerebral volume or intracranial volume.[41-47] In one study comparing boys with ADHD, their unaffected male siblings, and matched controls, the subjects with ADHD had a significant (4%) reduction in intracranial volume. Their unaffected siblings had a 3.4% reduction compared with controls (a statistical trend). Cortical right prefrontal gray matter and left occipital gray and white matter were reduced in the subjects with ADHD and their siblings.[42] This suggests that changes in cerebral volume need to reach a certain crucial level before they become obviously symptomatic. Moreover, this study strongly supports the genetic basis of ADHD.

__2.____Frontal lobe volume is smaller in persons with ADHD. Brain regions involved in self-regulation (executive function) show differences from those of controls. In most studies, the frontal lobes or subregions of the frontal lobes were found to be smaller in subjects with ADHD than in controls.[40,41,45,47-49] In one study, the inferior portions of dorsal prefrontal cortices and anterior temporal cortices, bilaterally, were reduced in subjects with ADHD.[49]

__3.____Various regions of the basal ganglia, particularly the caudate nucleus, have been reported to be smaller in children with ADHD compared with controls.[40,41,43,50] Studies on normal individuals have shown that the caudate decreases in size as the child matures (a manifestation of the normal "pruning" of neurons seen in many parts of the brain during development). Children with ADHD start out with smaller caudate nuclei than controls, and with maturation, there is a further decrease in size. As a result, any difference in size between children with ADHD and controls becomes less apparent with increasing age.[40,41,51] (This might explain the variability in size observed in different studies because the age of the subjects varied considerably across these studies.) Other regions of the basal ganglia have also been reported to be reduced in volume in subjects with ADHD relative to controls.[52,53]

__4.____Right hemisphere structures are affected more than left hemisphere structures. In normal child and adult populations, the right frontal area is larger than the left frontal area. Given the important role that the right hemisphere plays in regulating attention and the deficits seen in ADHD, it would not be surprising to observe reduction in right frontal lobe volume. This was not a consistent finding, but it was noted in a number of studies.[40-44,54] In some studies, a decrease in the right frontal gray-matter volume was noted, or changes in volumes of certain subcortical structures were more prominent on the right.[42,53] It is possible that the reduction in size is due to the reduction of global brain volume, as suggested by Castellanos et al.[40] In normal adults, the right caudate is larger than the left caudate.[55-57] However, based on the large National Institute of Mental Health study of children with ADHD, the right caudate nucleus is smaller than the left caudate nucleus.[58] This asymmetry was not necessarily observed in all studies, but they generally involved many fewer children and were not longitudinal.[43,46,49]

__5.____There is a relative decrease in the size of the cerebellum. The cerebellum also participates in the regulation of executive function as a result of its reciprocal connections to the prefrontal cortex.[59] The decreased size of the cerebellum in children with ADHD was initially described by Castellanos et al.[41] and has been corroborated in a number of other studies.[40,43,44,60,61]

__6.____A number of studies reported a reduction in the area of the anterior[42,44,62-64] or posterior corpus callosum.[65] However, in the large National Institute of Mental Health study, this was not confirmed.[41]

It is worth noting that treatment with psychostimulants was not responsible for the reduction in various brain areas because these findings were also noted in children who were drug naive. Interestingly, children on psychostimulant treatment actually had somewhat greater white-matter volumes than those who had not been treated. [40]

 

In summary, there is now much research suggesting that, when carefully examined, groups of children with ADHD have small but significant reductions in total brain volume and in the various regions of the brain that are involved in the regulation of attention and impulsivity. This would suggest that the behaviors seen in children with ADHD are not simply the result of environmental factors or some sort of distortion of perception on the part of parents and teachers, but rather a very real brain dysfunction.

[kyrill]

I'm a teacher and you can see clearly when a child is just hyper and when their ADD is pathological. There's a very wide spectrum and as far as ADD restrains the ability to function adequately, it exists.

[ccdan]

I'm in a debate with someone on another forum about whether AD(H)D actually exists. He thinks it doesn't. I argued a point with him that studies have shown that those with AD(H)D are statistically more likely to have smaller right frontal lobes than "normal" people. He countered that with studies that show that ritalin and other amphetamines cause shrinkage in the right frontal lobe (implying that the small frontal lobes in AD(H)D people weren't actually small before medication).

 

I want to know, first, if this is right, and second, if he's right in thinking that there are no neurological differences between AD(H)D people and "normal" people.

 

this is bullshit invented by the retads at APA!

 

 

ADHD has been a subject of great controversy and debate. A number of people who have been diagnosed with the syndrome—some of them psychologists and psychiatrists—have challenged the notion that personality traits such as inattentiveness, impulsivity, and distractibility deserve the label symptoms. They contend that many people labeled as having ADHD are neither “deficient” nor “disordered”—they are simply different. ADHD, this vocal minority argues, is not a mental disorder at all but a different state of mind, and it is because of this difference that people with ADHD often do not function well in standard learning or work environments. It is society and its expectations that have to change, they claim, not persons with short attention spans and high energy.

 

Indeed, the view of ADHD as a problem requiring medical intervention is highly culture-bound, being largely peculiar to the United States and Canada. This is not to say that the behaviours characteristic of ADHD are absent from children in other nations. The larger question is whether children in other countries are identified by their parents, teachers, and physicians as having a problem. In Great Britain and France only about 1 percent of children are diagnosed with “hyperkinetic disorder,” the closest equivalent to ADHD in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (the diagnostic system used by most medical professionals outside North America). And the British medical establishment hopes this number will remain comparatively low. The British Psychological Society suggested in a 1997 report that physicians and psychiatrists should not follow the American example of applying medical labels to such a wide variety of attention-related disorders: “The idea that children who don’t attend or who don’t sit still in school have a mental disorder is not entertained by most British clinicians.”

 

Emerging scientific evidence about the causes and consequences of ADHD lends some plausibility to this viewpoint. As noted above, neurologists are finding that the anatomic and physiological differences underlying ADHD appear to be mere variations in the timing of brain development, not outright defects. Other researchers suggest that the behaviours characteristic of ADHD may once have conferred an evolutionary advantage, which would explain why their underlying genetic components have been conserved in the human gene pool.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/279477/attention-deficithyperactivity-disorder/216017/Controversy-mental-disorder-or-state-of-mind

 

The problem with this and most other so called "mental illnesses" is that they're not real, verifiable brain disorders, but rather sets of behaviours subjectiely classified as "mental illnesses" by a buch of individuals through voting! And most so called psychiatric "studies" are crackpot science! It looks like the vast majority of those involved in all those studies lack even the most basic notions regarding the scientific method and scientific research in general. Almost all studies that try confirm any "menatal illness" are seriously flawed, with tons of errors that range from correlations interpreted as causation (a serious scientific error) to bad samples, or even basic logical fallacies... also, there is a tendecy to interpret incertanities as certainities outside the scientific circle, especially in public debates where the vast majority of people don't have the necessary knowledge to evaluate any claims...

Edited February 19, 2010 by ccdan

[vordhosbn]

From addforums.com

 

Hey im 14 and i was just diagnosed with ADD and my Doc Just Put me on Staterra im starting of with 18mg until i get to 60. The 18mg did help . I only lost focus like 3 times during school. I was Wondering if Strattera 60mg was as good as Adderall 60mg. And is it unsual to have a tingle in your legs? thx

I don't know if ADHD is a disorder or not, but giving highly addictive stimulant drugs to 14 year old is poor therapy in any case...

[futrethink]

---ccdan.

 

---Just to through a little humour into this post, to which APA do you ascribe this retarded conspiracy to because, in a quick search for what the acronym stood for, I found: Alabama Pharmacy Association, Ambulatory Pediatric Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, Arkansas Pharmacists Association, Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, Association of Paediatric Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland and the Australian Physiotherapy Association. That is not counting the others I didn’t find.

 

On to the serious stuff.

---You have brought up the other obvious aspect of this topic and that is that AD(H)D are only symbols/letters/words for something that could be a natural part of human life. An unknown and seemingly misunderstood aspect of it but, still normal for the human brain and, what might be, its full capabilities.

---In a way, all the concept described by “AD(H)D” is is just a cultural/societal way of describing something to encapsulate it into a certain box of knowledge in which to make it easier to deal with. It, in itself, is usually no problem for the people who have it. The problems arise from the interaction with others and their expectations of how things are or should be. This includes the ideas of how parents and/or adults think children should act.

---The above ideas of parents and/or adults about the supposed actions of children are in part due to a fast paced and information overloaded society, with the multiple and, in many cases, too many areas of focus/stress that parents and/or the adults that interact with AD(H)D children chose/are forced to have in their personal lives.

[psynapse]

This doesn't sit well with me for a few reasons.

 

Firstly, where do you draw the line between a legitimate disorder of cognition and one's tendency to act in a certain way? Will Ad(h)d pass this test?

 

Secondly, is there such a thing as a mental disorder? A quick search for definition seems to have cognition and impaired ability to cope in society as the main points for what constitutes a disorder of the mind. A solipsistic point of view would lead me to say "no". However medications which do significantly alleviate some "mental disorders" leads me to "yes", which is ultimately anecdotal evidence as we do not have a comprehensive biochemical theory for the mind yet.

 

If medication causes an increased overall quality of life for the individual does it matter whether or not the prescription is ethical/moral?

This seems to me at least that it is moral as long as the long term affects are manageable and clearly outlined to the patient.

 

Which brings me to thirdly, the long term affects of amphetamine administration is: brain shrinkage, invagination of 5-HT receptors, increased blood pressure and the development of AD(H)D among other things. Basically amphetamine dependence, seems to me big pharma!?

 

big pharma 101

-Convince people they have a disease which is undesirable. (alopecia, acne, depression, AD(H)D. etc.)

-Convince these people that there is a solution to their issue.

-Convince people that the solution is reasonably priced.

[japan rocks/andromeda]

i will do reasearch in my school library