As far as I understand, ADHD and ADD are a product of the inability to process dopamine or a deficiency of dopamine. So why are there not tests or screenings that can show with evidence the deficiency and the presence of ADHD?
I’m looking at a possibility that my son(4) could have ADHD and the possibility that a doctor will recommend medication. I am not against medication but I fear putting him on medication that will alter his brain chemistry at such a young age especially if he does not actually have ADHD and the phase that he is going through will be one he will naturally grow out of as his brain develops.
In: Biology
>As far as I understand, ADHD and ADD are a product of the inability to process dopamine or a deficiency of dopamine.
This is just a general hypothesis. We don’t know exactly how ADHD does what it does. People don’t have a standard amount of dopamine, or any neurotransmitter, for us to measure. It’s constantly in flux, varies region to region, is constantly released and reabsorbed based on what you’re thinking about, doing, and the status of every system your body has, physical and mental (hunger, tiredness, boredness, etc.). And it’s not clear that people with ADHD have less dopamine in any significant way, just that their behaviors can be changed by adding more artificial dopamine or slowing reuptake.
If we could just get a measure of your dopamine levels though, the thing that is stopping us is we would have to collect a sample from your brain, or at least your cerebral fluid. The amount of dopamine in a blood draw has very little relation to the amount of dopamine you would find in the prefrontal cortex because of the blood-brain barrier.
The other option is trying to match up symptoms, and most of the symptoms of ADHD are behavioral, so we’ve largely based diagnosis on examining behavioral patterns, although there are more “scientific” things they’ll do in a comprehensive evaluation, like hand-eye reflex and verbal memory tests. The other correlated symptom you can see is underdevelopment of the prefrontal cortex in many untreated cases of ADHD, but it’s an expensive scan to do and you won’t know until it’s done developing, and the adolescent years are when treating ADHD has the most impact, when they’re in school.
What research does support is that therapeutic doses of ADHD medication are generally not harmful, ADHD or not. It doesn’t develop into a chemical dependency or permanently alter the body’s own regulation of neurotransmitters unless abused over long periods of time. So it’s fairly safe to try, under the care of a responsible doctor.
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