ADHD: Not Bad Behavior But Physical Illness

Are you facing difficulties in finishing tasks, listening to your boss or concentrating on your current project of work? You may be having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder commonly known as ADHD. ADHD leads to people finding it difficult to concentrate on one thing at a time, leading to troubled relationships and difficulty in school or work. Youngsters are known to be prone to this disorder due to hormonal and social changes they go through. ADHD leads to poor social involvement, low self-esteem and inability to work in a child. Children develop such disorder during the childhood or on their way to adulthood due to poor parenting. ADHD which is often confused as a behavioral issue is found to be a physical disorder according to a recent research.
According to a study released recently, ADHD is a physical disorder as people suffering from this disorder are known to have slightly smaller brain organ than those who don’t.

‘Structural differences’ were found in the brain along with delayed development compared to non-sufferers. The study’s lead author, Martine Hoogman of Radboud University Medical Centre, Netherlands said, ‘the results from our study confirm that people with ADHD have differences in their brain structure and therefore suggest that ADHD is a disorder of the brain’. She said in a statement, ‘we hope that this will help to reduce stigma that ADHD is ‘just a label’ for difficult children or caused by poor parenting’. It involved 1,713 people with ADHD and 1,529 people without the condition to get the results in the study published in the Lancit Psychiatry. ADHD, often found in children, is blamed for severe and repeated bouts of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsiveness that can cause problems at school or home. Drugs for treating ADHD, such as Ritalin, have been blamed for side effects including weight loss or gain, liver damage and suicidal thoughts among the patients. Hoogman and her team analysed the MRI scans of people aged 4 to 64 years with and without ADHD.

Small differences were found in the brain of those suffering from ADHD after the research. Hoogman added, ‘These differences are very small — in the range of a few percent — so the unprecedented size of our study was crucial to help identify these’. The regions of the brain affected included the amygdala, which is involved in the regulation of emotion. The differences observed in their study were most prominent in children, but also present in adults with the condition. The findings concluded delays in the development of several brain regions were characteristic of ADHD, according to the research. No difference was found between people who were taking or had taken ADHD drugs, and those who had never taken such medications. Brain changes caused by psychostimulants are yet not proved.
[“source-ndtv”]