Questions Abound About ADHD
A follower asked if children outgrow ADHD. Research shows that 50% of children with ADHD will “grow out of it” by late adolescence. This means that they might still have some symptoms but the symptoms are fewer and mild enough that they would no longer meet criteria for an ADHD diagnosis.
The research also shows that their brains do not change to normal but do improve in that direction. Those who have been treated with stimulants show more brain improvement, but still don’t attain “normal.”
For the 50% of us who continue to have the full syndrome, our brains did not change but our symptoms do moderate somewhat. This is presumably due to some brain maturation and to our learning how to cope, getting strategies. For example, hyperactivity usually becomes less and manifests more as fidgeting.
Controversy O the Day:
There are some reports of adult onset ADHD but I have found no substantiating data and I do not believe it. Almost by definition, we are born with ADHD.
Doug
Irrelevant Note O the Day:
I’m experimenting with different ways to post an image to facebook. Maybe one of these will work. I think perhaps demonic forces are working against me.
Link to specific data about ADHD brain
Life with ADHD
ADDadultstrategies 
ken – i partly agree, the evolution part.. i think the reason girls are so underreported is that they tend to have inattentive type, and quietly dont cause any problems. they surface when they grow up and get a job and/or a family and have responsibilities that over whelm them.
maybe in the past when we were mostly farmers it wasnt such a problem,maybe life was simpler? And before that, maybe some advantage for hunter/gathers? we now have so many choices and so much a flood of information and so much technology that requires focus that it is increasingly a problem and certainly not an evolutionary benefit.
it seems likely that the differences in our brains were there from birth or conception, supported by imaging and genetic and familial studies. possibly epigenetics then plays a role?
on the other hand, my ADHD didn’t show up until the fourth grade, as far as I can tell.I wonder if there were earlier symptoms that I cannot recall?
thank you for commenting. i value your thoughts, tho I may not entirely agree with them.
doug
LikeLike
Interesting thoughts but I disagree with your theory that we’re born with adhd. Recent research has indicated the reason adhd in girls is so under reported is that it tends to develop later in girls than in boys. I think evolution plays a big part in understanding adhd. This is a behaviour that has been grown over centuries and only become a problem in the last job one to two.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, on a side-note: there’s a lot of grown women being diagnosed with asperger syndrome at a high age, and I think anyone would agree that you’re born with asperger syndrome (except for Anti-vaxxers, I guess). The reason given for that is that women have a natural tendency (more in comparison to men) to pick up social cues and mimic them. My educated guess would be that the same applies to ADHD, and little girls are less prone to act their ADHD-caused frustration out on other people. Let’s face it: most little boys are diagnosed after they start getting violent against others; little girls tend to have more tantrums.
I sure remember being about 4 and very frustrated about something, and smashing my piggy bank to pieces to extinguish that anger. But I was from the time and age where you’d just spank little kids and that’d be it. I didn’t hit anyone, so it was “allright”.
LikeLiked by 2 people
ram – i dont know much about the aspergers, except it must be from birth (and has nothing to do with vaccinations.) i remember banging on the door with my little hammer in a rage at about 4, had never thought of connecting it with ADHD before. little boys may get violent, or just disruptive. little girls tend to just sit quietly and not cause any trouble and their adhd doesnt get noticed. I dont know about the tantrums. I got violent at the 4th grade, and then it lasted for years. sad.
thank you for commenting
doug
LikeLiked by 1 person
Maybe tantrum is the wrong word. Children tend to throw a tantrum when they want something particular, right? Well, what happens with my niece is that she gets visibly frustrated of feels put on the spot by something that, while it’s defenitely there, it’s minimal. Once we were skyping (they live in Australia) and she decided to sing some Beatles’ songs for me. After singing “Come together” over the playing track, shyly but gladly, she urged her mom (my sis) to play the other song she liked to sing along to. My sis didn’t know which one and asked her to sing a bit of the track so she knew how it went and my niece was stumped. She started getting nervous insisting my sis knew exactly what song it was, and before my sister had time to suggest anything else, my niece started screaming, squealing even. My sister has a very good grip on this type of reaction – she stays calm, but stern and says things like “I can’t understand what you’re saying. Please talk with me and we will figure this out” – but there was nothing she could do. My niece screamed, shrieked and then ran to her room where she hid beneath the bedcovers and sobbed loudly (but not putting on a show, rather hiding). It broke my heart to see the little girl suffering, knowing exactly what she was feeling, and not being able to comfort her. 😦
The next time I called, she was in high spirits. She was doodling with a contraption that allowed her to make perfect spirals with a crayon on paper. She eagerly told me she was gonna show me. Something slipped and the spiral she wanted to show me got crooked. Yelling, crying, shrieking. She felt put on the spot, that’s what it was. She said she was going to show me a perfect spiral and her plan went wrong. She didn’t know what else to do, she felt she couldn’t react any other way. Oh but I remember that feeling so well… it’s like not only your chest and forearms are burning, the top of your head is as well. And I sit across the globe and feel powerless. 😦
LikeLike
I don’t think you can make the link between AS and ADHD quite that way. Over the last few years, Aja Louise Murray of Cambridge University has been researching ADHD in girls and finds that it definitely ‘develops’ later on in life. That isn’t earlier symptoms being masked by behaviour. They aren’t there.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As for the link between ADHD and AS, it wasn’t a link per se, it was more like a comparison of how one sex might learn to mask certain traits. I hope that much was clear.
As for the study… well, I remain skeptical. I can defenitely – as a grown woman – trace ADHD traits back to my early childhood, and it still remained undiagnosed until I was 32 and struggling to keep a steady job. Of course, here on the blog, me experience amounts to anecdotal evidence – which is nothing. I just can’t stop being skeptical because there are so many people who were only diagnosed as adults for this or that reason.
I was once in an internet forum for ADHD which was mostly adults with ADHD and found many people, pretty much like me. It was funny to notice some common traits among certain “types of ADHDer”, too. In that forum, you had/chose to show under your name when you were diagnosed with ADHD. Almost ALL people in the forum had been diagnosed as adults. And that seemed to have happened when they started struggling to keep up either with college or work – exactly the same as me! And everyone though they were a bit agitated or eccentric from an early age, but no one bothered because everyone did well in school.
Do you happen to have a link for the study? I should very much like to take a peek. Cambridge is a very well reputed institution and well, either I’ll change my view or reinforce my skepticism. Who knows? 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I too wasn’t diagnosed until late into my adulthood – I think that is a separate issue to be honest. I can’t speak for elsewhere but services in the UK are quite good at picking up with diagnoses and there is little or no stigma to having ADHD on the whole for the modern generation. I can give you two links. the first is a summary – https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/01/16/new-findings-could-help-explain-why-adhd-is-often-overlooked-in-girls/ – and the second is the full research – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.12721 – depending on your time!
LikeLiked by 1 person
(I have to reply in two parts, because the browser is freaking out on me…) Part 1:
Thanks for the links! I don’t mean to step on your toes, but no matter how I look at the article, I can’t can’t find supporting passages that ADHD on girls develops from a certain age AND was inexistent up until that point. As a matter of fact, their group consisted of subjects _already_ diagnosed with ADHD, both male and female and the study focuses on the “developmental trajectories in ADHD symptoms” – as in, how the severeness of the symptoms changes with age, rather than >when< they appear with age.
I think the confusing part is that they speak of an "onset of symptoms", as if they were non-existent before. But as one can see from the different graphs, there have been registered values for both the males and the females on each and every symptom – they symptoms were already there, they varied with age – and slightly different between sexes.
LikeLike
(I have to reply in two parts, because the browser is freaking out on me. THIS IS PART 2!!)
Other than that, their conclusion defenitely shows caution in saying their hypothesis was right, as they say that the paper only partially supported their thesis (following, a quote straight from their 4 DISCUSSION):
“We hypothesized that females would be more likely to show trajectory categories characterized by later onsets, while males would be more likely to show trajectory categories characterized by early onsets. This was partially supported;”
ADHD would not be – incicentally – the only disease/condition/syndrom that is present all the person’s life and is triggered by something.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Indeed it is not a complete result – but then no results are – and yes, the results are tentative and cautionary. It will be good to see the next step in research with this. Nonetheless, this research can’t be ignored and dismissed with hypothetical possible explanations. Until disproven, it stands as a tentative record. Hearsay, because it is more convenient to fit a favoured theory, is never a safe bet. Anyway, I leave it there as a point which is worth bringing up and may well prove to be further validated over time. Thanks for the discussion!
LikeLike
I thank you for the discussion as well but, I politely refute the notion that my opinion is based on hearsay, as I’ve based my last reply solely on the content and language of the study in question; nor dismissed, as I simply pointed a different perception of the study.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My apologies, you have mistaken my words and that is my fault. The ‘hearsay’ to which I refer was not pointed at you (if anything it was at Doug! Sorry Doug!) – as Doug brought it up as a provocative point based on experience rather than offer research evidence. My point is that I will be more swayed by research (with very definite caveats) than by limited experience – excellent though Doug’s is. I don’t agree with your perception of the study though. My main point is that the research points to later development of ADHD in girls – I quote “Second, our results suggest that while perceptions of ADHD as a childhood disorder are changing, more attention may need to be focused on the period around the beginning of adolescence in terms of detection of symptoms.” – we can debate the terms but the study is clear that girls exhibit symptoms at a later age and it is expedient for clinicians to modify their criteria to allow for this. The hypothesis that ADHD is from birth – because boys exhibit this – is, in my opinion, a backward and unhelpful step. But I may be wrong! More research will, I’m sure, prove one thing or another 🙂 Again, apologies that you misunderstood the direction of my comment – I find no fault in your argument even if I don’t agree with it 🙂
LikeLike
ken – I’m like many , or most? people. once i’m set in my ideas, i stay pretty set. i think it’s called “observer bias”? i think the girls just weren’t noticed earlier. but i do try to keep an open mind and go with the science, and i will look up your reference. so thank you for the lead. and as always, thank you for commenting
doug
LikeLiked by 2 people
Take a look at the paper, Doug. All kids on the sample have ADHD, boys and girls. The study uses a strange language (it describes the sudden increased severeness of symptoms as “onset”) and even in the conclusion they say that their thesis is >partly< supported by the paper.
LikeLike
Doug it was an eye-opener to me. But interesting as my daughter has just been diagnosed with autism after my son received the same diagnosis (after he and I were diagnosed with ADHD). We certainly didn’t miss our daughter’s symptoms – they just developed in recent years. Not saying ADHD and Autism MUST be the same, but the research rang true with our situation I have to say…
LikeLike