Adhd Review

In “Neuroscience of Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder: the Search For Endophenotypes” addresses ADHD as a highly controversial topic, as well as being one of the most popular condition amongst children and adolescence today. Despite the controversy ADHD faces, Castellanos and Tannock are in pursuit of finding a cause or development of this disease through Endophenotypes. To start out, the American Psychiatric Association has developed a diagnostics test for ADHD where one must answer questions based on inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Even though this is a valid test in the process of diagnoses, it faces many problems such as, inefficient proof in the operational definition of specific symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity, therefore one behavior can me misinterpreted as evidence for several other symptoms. In order to get a cause of ADHD, symptom based descriptive diagnoses served as a prerequisite for aetiological factors. First, genetic factors have shown a major contribution by showing that people with a genome where a dopamine receptor D4, and dopamine transporter DAT were excluded, faced being susceptible to ADHD. Environmental factors include: brain injury, stroke, early deprivation, family psychosocial issues, and prenatal smoking. In efforts of explaining loco motor hyperactivity in ADHD, a study was given to boys with ADHD that showed they’re more active than normal children their age even during sleep, which indicates that loco motor hyperactivity is a primary symptom. Dopamine treatment through stimulant drugs proved to extraordinarily effective for short-term treatment of ADHD, confirmed by a random placebo controlled test given to adults. Current research indicates the frontal lobe, basal ganglia, caudate nucleus, cerebellum, as well as other areas of the brain, play a significant role in ADHD because they are involved in complex processes that regulate behavior. These higher order processes are referred to as executive

References: * F. Xavier Castellanos and Rosemary Tannock (August 2002). Neuroscience of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: The Search for Endophenotypes. Nature Reviews, Vol 3 No 8: HTML version