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How To Find Real Research About ADD and ADHD

Have you ever wondered how to do your own ADD research and find good, reliable resources for ADHD research?

It’s actually easier than you think.

Real ADD Research Studies

A lot of ADD news, or new ADHD research studies come with a lot of hype when reported on by the media. That’s because it takes a flashy headline to get people to click, and flashy, doesn’t always mean accurate. Take the recent study promoted under headlines about people with ADD having smaller brains. That study, kind of, sort of, almost said that, but not really.

To sort through a lot of the fake ADD research and fake ADHD treatments, it helps to go right to the source. Unfortunately, much scientific research is hidden behind paywalls, or only accessible in dense, hard to find, medical and research journals.

That being said, all government funded scientific research (almost all of it, when it comes to ADHD and ADD) is cataloged, with a summary, on various government websites. Most often, you’ll find new ADD research and science on the National Institute of Health (NIH) website, the CDC website, or on the Medline Plus website. Any of these resources catalogs the real research, right from the source.

Unfortunately, the search function on these websites often leaves a lot to be desired. But, Google indexes all of these websites and does a nice job cataloging them. The key is to restrict your research to these sites in order to get a list of “good” ADHD research results.

The SITE Operator

You can go through the steps to setup your own custom Google search, but there is an easier way.

On the regular Google search website, you can add site: to any search to restrict the search to the specified website. For example, if you just wanted to search for ADHD tips on this website, you could do something like this:

adhd tips site:addessories.com

The site:addessories.com part tells Google to only return results from that specific website. So, if you wanted to only see results from the NIH website, you can just type site:nih.gov after your search terms.

Search All Government Websites Together

Unfortunately, not all ADHD data is cross-posted to all of the websites. If you want to know about St John’s Wort for ADD and ADHD, you’ll want to search Medline and NIH. Luckily, it doesn’t take any extra searches to search all of the relevant websites.

Since the .gov domain is actually restricted to government entities, you can get by with using the site operator with “gov” instead of being more specific. (Similarly, you can search only .edu websites by searching for edu with the site operator.)

adhd st johns wort site:gov

Searching like this gives you a normal Google search of terms, but eliminates all the phony ADHD treatment websites, and ADD con-artists, leaving just official government funded research.

You can take it one step further by using the Tools menu on the Google search page to bring up the time parameters and then choose something like “Past year” to only get the most recent ADD news and research.

Managing Your ADHD / ADD

Managing your ADD / ADHD is tricky enough without having to sift through old, disproven, or plain fake ADD news, research and information. So, use the gov searches to get the original documents, even if it is just a summary. That way you know if you are dealing with legitimate data, or just someone who wants to sell you a bunch of ADHD pills that may or may not help treat your ADD.

People With ADD Have Smaller Brains!

Written by ADDer 1 Comment

People with ADHD have smaller brains. Well, that’s what one headline said anyway.

As usual, the media has a hard time turning a large, scientific study into a click-inducing headline with much accuracy. I haven’t had a chance to read anything but various media accounts yet, but the study in question actually appears to show that in a large sample size there are differences in brain structures between children (especially) with ADD, versus kids without Attention Deficit Disorder, or if you prefer, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

What does that mean?

Well, for one thing, it does NOT mean that people with ADD have smaller brains.

What it does mean, is that some physical differences in the brain are detectable in large sample sizes.

What does THAT mean?

It means that there likely is a physical cause (or predisposition) of ADD / ADHD. In other words, it is not just all in your head, although we already knew that. It looks like there may be some connection between ADD and actual brain structure rather than just brain chemistry, and that is interesting.

That big sample sizes thing is not a throwaway, it’s important.

Researchers stated that they could NOT detect a difference in size among individuals, or even among small sample sets. It’s only when you take a LOT of brain scans of people with ADD and statistically average them out (more or less) that you can compare that number to a LOT of brain scans of people without ADD and certain sections in the brain appear smaller overall.

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What does THAT mean!

Well, that means that brain size is not a good way to diagnose or detect ADD because it won’t vary enough from normal for any one individual. It does however, mean that more study would be useful to see what else, if anything differs in an ADHD brain.

One other interesting feature of the study is that most of these size differences go away with age. In other words, a lot of kids out grow ADHD, which has also been known. However, what makes this interesting is the idea that it is simply a later brain growth that triggers ADD. Think of it like how different kids hit puberty at different ages.

Unfortunately, unlike being a “late bloomer” means being smaller for an extra year or two, this requires several years to catch up.

I’ll read the actual study when I can, and get back with some more details, but in the meantime, you can check out news about it online if you are interested.

ADHD Study Suggests Higher Suicide Rate in Adults

Written by ADDer 1 Comment

A recent study published in Pediatrics has a couple of potentially interesting conclusions. The first conclusion is that ADD from childhood often persists into adulthood. That isn’t news to anyone who reads this website, but you know me, I like my knowledge backed up by published science. The researchers used a sample of 5,700+ children associated with the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and found 367 were diagnosed with ADHD as children. They then followed up with that same pool as adults when they were approximately 29 years old. 232 of the original pool allowed access to their medical records.

ADHD Continues into Adulthood

The researchers found that approximately 30 percent of the adults who were diagnosed with ADD as children continue to have ADD as adults. In other words, about a third of children diagnosed with ADHD as kids will still have ADHD as adults. That isn’t new information. Most of us ADDers on here know all too well that ADD doesn’t necessarily go away once you turn 18 years old, despite the fact that health insurance companies like to stop covering it then.

The percentage is a new confirmation of just how many adults who had ADD as kids end up with it in adulthood as well.

ADD May Have Higher Suicide Risk and Other Risks

Another interesting tidbit of this particular study is statistically valid finding of a higher incidence of suicide in the population of people diagnosed with ADD as children. Before anyone goes and freaks out, the raw numbers aren’t quite as scary. Out of the 367 people in the study who were diagnosed with ADHD as children, three of them had committed suicide by the time the study was done. In contrast, 7 people in the larger pool of nearly 5,000 non-ADD participants committed suicide. While statistically relevant, it does NOT suggest that people with ADHD are doomed in anyway.

Also not new information, was the finding that people diagnosed with ADHD have a higher incidence of other mental health issues. Called co-morbid indicators for ADD, these other mental health issues most commonly included depression and alcoholism.

What was new information for me was that these higher incidences of metal health problems were also indicated for the population that had ADD as children, but did not continue to have ADD as adults. This may feed into the thought that ADD is a smaller subset of a larger, as of yet, not understood mechanism acting within the brain.

As always, the key is to get the help you need when you need it and then adjust your life accordingly. There is always plenty to enjoy in life no matter who you are. Play to your strengths, and pursue your interests. You’ll still forget stuff and leave important things laying around, but you’ll have plenty of fun along the way.

Natural Cure for ADD – Exercise

Written by ADDer Leave a Comment

I’m not sure if we got on someone’s radar somehow, or if we are showing up in certain search results, but I have gotten an increasing number of comments and emails regarding exercise as a cure for ADD.

Let me start by saying that I am a proponent of alternative treatments for ADD, if you can find one that works for you. I am skeptical that any one little change to your lifestyle will result in a cure for ADHD in adults or children. In fact, if some little adjustment to how you go about your daily life “cures your ADD”, I would question how legitimate your diagnosis was in the first place.

ADD is not some little nitpicky, attitude adjustment waiting to happen. If you believe differently, you are in the wrong place.

That being said, let me also point out that exercise has been shown to have a beneficial effect on attention deficit disorder. Of course, it has been shown to have a beneficial effect on heart disease, depression, sleeping problems, fibromyalgia, and just about everything else that medical science has a name for. In fact, at this point, it is probably a waste of money to study whether exercise is helpful for medical conditions, because I think everyone with or without a medical degree or PhD can see a pattern here.

Of course, being helpful is not the same thing as a cure. For example, if you have heart disease and embark upon a medically sound exercise regimen, that is going to be very helpful, but you are fool if you have serious heart disease and you are not also taking prescription medications that can make an even bigger difference.

Likewise, while aerobic exercise might improve your ADD symptoms substantially, if it is not enough, then you should also avail yourself to other possible ADD treatments, alternative or otherwise, although you would be wise to continue exercising as well.

If you want a stronger endorsement of exercise as a cure-all for ADD or ADHD, you’re going to have to find someone trying to sell a book or an expensive, herbal supplement, or something, because I know that while exercise always makes me feel better in the long run, and does indeed help my attention issues somewhat, it is not enough to “cure” my ADHD.