Eli5: Since the ADHD brain is developing in an abnormal way, why aren’t scientists trying to surgically fix the brain’s abnormal structure?

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Eli5: Since the ADHD brain is developing in an abnormal way, why aren’t scientists trying to surgically fix the brain’s abnormal structure?

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9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s happening at a microscopic scale all over the brain, so fixing it surgically isn’t really an option. Also surgery almost always carries some risks, so it’s kinda the thing you do in medicine when nothing else works well enough.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because brain surgery is as complex as, well, brain surgery.

Even in cases where it’s super clear what should/should not be there, it’s very easy to mess something up and leave the patient permanently disabled, or worse, brain-dead.

Add in the complexity that ADHD is not an easily identifiable and useless tumor, but a problem in the otherwise working neurons, and you get a recipe for disaster if you tried to fix it through surgery.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because even if we knew how to do it, which we don’t, brain surgery is difficult and traumatic. They need to saw a hole in your skull to even reach the brain. And cutting anything at all can have massive unintended consequences, so we can’t really reach much beyond the surface.

Ever heard of inoperable brain cancer? It’s because you’d need to cut through vitally important parts of the brain in order to remove it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not every neurodevelopmental disorder is necessarily anatomical as opposed to biochemical.

Surgery would only be effective if the source of the disorder was confined to one brain region, and one operation could solve it – like severing the corpus callosum in an epileptics.

Scientists are still working to discover biomarkers of ADHD, but mostly irregularities in dopamine and noradrenalin function has been studied, as opposed to anatomical brain differences, possibly because the pharmaceutical industry stands to gain more from biochemical research.

There has been some recent research into brain scans of ADHD patients displaying distinct patterns, so you could look into that if you want

Anonymous 0 Comments

Setting aside the impracticality of physically operating on a brain to that degree, you seem to be coming across this in the incorrect manner. ADHD brains aren’t generally abnormal in a way that is purely negative like say…a brain with a large tumor. They’re simply optimized differently.

Put them into their proper situation, and they absolutely shine. Set them up to attempt to thrive in a situation they’re not optimized for, and they languish. This sort of thing isn’t something you generally surgically correct for.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Neurodivergent brains aren’t broken. They just work on a different OS. There’s nothing to fix.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Neurons are very small and the brain is very complicated. Most brain surgeries involve taking something out that is not supposed to be there (like a tumor). We don’t have the technology to surgically “fix” neurons, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know which ones to fix to treat ADHD.

Anonymous 0 Comments

there is nothing they can fix, we dont understand the brain well enough to fiddle around with it in such a manner, especially considering stuff like ADHD is not a localized issue but a global one.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not every brain is the same therefore not every person should be forced into the same mold. The problem is not with the ADHD brain but rather the square peg society tries to force it into.