Given the alarming increase in the diagnosis of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) over the last 20 years, I thought pertinent to feature today an older paper, from the year 2000.
Dopamine, one of the chemicals that the neurons use to communicate, has been heavily implicated in ADHD. So heavily in fact that Ritalin, the main drug used for the treatment of ADHD, has its main effects by boosting the amount of dopamine in the brain.
Swanson et al. (2000) reasoned that people with a particular genetic abnormality that makes their dopamine receptors work less optimally may have more chances to have ADHD. The specialist reader may want to know that the genetic abnormality in question refers to a 7-repeat allele of a 48-bp variable number of tandem repeats in exon 3 of the dopamine receptor number 4 located on chromosome 11, whose expression results in a weaker dopamine receptor. We’ll call it DRD4,7-present as opposed to DRD4,7-absent (i.e. people without this genetic abnormality).
They had access to 96 children diagnosed with ADHD after the diagnostic criteria of DSM-IV and 48 matched controls (children of the same gender, age, school affiliation, socio-economic status etc. but without ADHD). About half of the children diagnosed with ADHD had the DRD4,7-present.
The authors tested the children on 3 tasks:
(i) a color-word task to probe the executive function network linked to anterior cingulate brain regions and to conflict resolution;
(ii) a cued-detection task to probe the orienting and alerting networks linked to posterior parietal and frontal brain regions and to shifting and maintenance of attention; and
(iii) a go-change task to probe the alerting network (and the ability to initiate a series of rapid response in a choice reaction time task), as well as the executive network (and the ability to inhibit a response and re-engage to make another response) (p. 4756).
Invalidating the authors’ hypothesis, the results showed that the controls and the DRD4,7-present had similar performance at these tasks, in contrast to the DRD4,7-absent who showed “clear abnormalities in performance on these neuropsychological tests of attention” (p. 4757).
This means two things:
1) Half of the children diagnosed with ADHD did not have an attention deficit.
2) These same children had the DRD4,7-present genetic abnormality, which has been previously linked with novelty seeking and risky behaviors. So it may be just possible that these children do not suffer from ADHD, but “may be easily bored in the absence of highly stimulating conditions, may show delay aversion and choose to avoid waiting, may have a style difference that is adaptive in some situations, and may benefit from high activity levels during childhood” (p. 4758).
Great paper and highly influential. The last author of the article (meaning the chief of the laboratory) is none other that Michael I. Posner, whose attentional networks, models, and tests feature every psychology and neuroscience textbook. If he doesn’t know about attention, then I don’t know who is.
One of the reasons I chose this paper is because it seems to me that a lot of teachers, nurses, social workers, or even pediatricians feel qualified to scare the living life out of parents by suggesting that their unruly child may have ADHD. In deference to most form the above-mentioned professions, the majority of people recognize their limits and tell the concerned parents to have the child tested by a qualified psychologist. And, unfortunately, even that may result in dosing your child with Ritalin needlessly when the child’s propensity toward a sensation-seeking temperament and extravert personality, may instead require a different approach to learning with a higher level of stimulation (after all, the children form the above study had been diagnosed by qualified people using their latest diagnosis manual).
Bottom line: beware of any psychologist or psychiatrist who does not employ a battery of attention tests when diagnosing your child with ADHD.
Reference: Swanson J, Oosterlaan J, Murias M, Schuck S, Flodman P, Spence MA, Wasdell M, Ding Y, Chi HC, Smith M, Mann M, Carlson C, Kennedy JL, Sergeant JA, Leung P, Zhang YP, Sadeh A, Chen C, Whalen CK, Babb KA, Moyzis R, & Posner MI. (25 April 2000). Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder children with a 7-repeat allele of the dopamine receptor D4 gene have extreme behavior but normal performance on critical neuropsychological tests of attention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97(9):4754-4759. doi: 10.1073/pnas.080070897. Article | FREE FULLTEXT PDF
P.S. If you think that “weeell, this research happened 16 years ago, surely something came out of it” then think again. The newer DSM-V’s criteria for diagnosis are likely to cause an increase in the prevalence of diagnosis of ADHD.
By Neuronicus, 26 February 2016