Aug 3, 2020 | Stephen Faraone, Ph.D.
As a researcher who has devoted most of the past three decades to studying ADHD, I am surprised (and somewhat embarrassed) to see how little research has focused on how ADHD affects the romantic side of life. There are over 25,000 articles about ADHD listed on www.pubmed.gov, but only a few have provided data about love, sex and ADHD. Bruner and colleagues studied ADHD symptoms and romantic relationship quality in 189 college students. Those students who had high levels of both hyperactivity-impulsivity and inattentiveness reported that the quality of their romantic relationships was relatively low compared with students who had low levels of ADHD symptoms. Another study of 497 college students found that ADHD symptoms predicted a greater use of maladaptive coping strategies in romantic relationships and less romantic satisfaction. A study of young adults compared conflict resolution and problem-solving in romantic couples. It found that ADHD symptoms were associated with greater negativity and less positivity during a conflict resolution task and that higher symptoms predicted less relational satisfaction. But this was not true of the ADHD member of the couple only had inattentive symptoms, which suggests that the severity of ADHD symptoms might drive relationship problems. Unlike the studies of adults, the romantic relationships of adolescents with and without ADHD did not differ on levels of aggression or relationship quality, although only one study addressed this issue.
What about sex? The study of adolescents found that, irrespective of gender, adolescents with ADHD had nearly double the number of lifetime sexual partners. That finding is consistent with Barkley’s follow-up study of ADHD children. He and his colleagues found that ADHD predicted early sexual activity and early parenthood. Similar findings were reported by Flory and colleagues in retrospective study of young adults. Childhood ADHD predicted earlier initiation of sexual activity and intercourse, more sexual partners, more casual sex, and more partner pregnancies. When my colleagues and I studied 1001 adults in the community, we found that adults with ADHD endorsed less stability in their love relationships, felt less able to provide emotional support to their loved ones, experienced more sexual dysfunction and had higher divorce rates.
The research literature about love, sex and ADHD is small, but it is consistent.
REFERENCES
Bruner, M. R., A. D. Kuryluk, et al. (2014). “Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptom Levels and Romantic Relationship Quality in College Students.” J Am Coll Health: 1-11.
Biederman, J., S. V. Faraone, et al. (2006). “Functional impairments in adults with self-reports of diagnosed ADHD: A controlled study of 1001 adults in the community.” J Clin Psychiatry 67(4): 524-540.
Canu, W. H., L. S. Tabor, et al. (2014). “Young Adult Romantic Couples’ Conflict Resolution and Satisfaction Varies with Partner’s Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Type.” J Marital Fam Ther 40(4): 509-524.
Rokeach, A. and J. Wiener (2014). “The Romantic Relationships of Adolescents With ADHD.” J Atten Disord.
Barkley, R. A., M. Fischer, et al. (2006). “Young adult outcome of hyperactive children: adaptive functioning in major life activities.” J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry 45(2): 192-202.
Flory, K., B. S. Molina, et al. (2006). “Childhood ADHD predicts risky sexual behavior in young adulthood.” J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol 35(4): 571-577.
Overbey, G. A., W. E. Snell, Jr., et al. (2011). “Subclinical ADHD, stress, and coping in romantic relationships of university students.” J Atten Disord 15(1): 67-78.
Jul 22, 2020 | Stephen Faraone, Ph.D.
A recent paper by Margaret Sibley and colleagues addresses a key issue in the diagnosis of adult ADHD. Is it sufficient to only collect data from the patient being diagnosed or are informants useful or, perhaps, essential, for diagnosing ADHD in adults. Dr. Sibley presented as systematic review of twelve studies that prospectively followed ADHD children into adulthood. Each of these studies asked a simple question: What faction of ADHD youth continued to have ADHD in adulthood. Surprisingly, the estimates of ADHD’s persistence ranged from a low of 4% to a high of 77%. They found two study features that accounted for much of this wide range. The first was the nature of the informant; did the study rely only on the patient’s report or were other informants consulted. The second was the use of a strict diagnostic threshold of six symptoms. When they limited the analysis to studies that used informant and eliminated the six symptom threshold, the range of estimates was much narrower, 40% to 77%. From studies that computed multiple measures of persistence using different criteria, the authors concluded: “(1) requiring impairment to be present for diagnosis reduced persistence rates; (2) a norm-based symptom threshold led to higher persistence than a strict six-symptom DSM-based symptom count criterion; and (3) informant reports tended to show a higher number of symptoms than self-reports.” These data have clear implications for what clinicians can do to avoid false positive and false negative diagnoses when diagnosing adult ADHD. It is reassuring that the self-reports of ADHD patients tend to underestimate the number and severity of ADHD symptoms. This means that your patients are not typically exaggerating their symptoms. Put differently, self-reports will not lead you to over-diagnose adult ADHD. Instead, reliance on self-reports can lead to false negative diagnoses, i.e., concluding that someone does not have ADHD when, in fact, they do. You can avoid false negatives by doing a thorough assessment, which is facilitated by some tools available at www.adhdinadults.com and described in CME videos there. If you think a patient might have ADHD but are not certain, it would be helpful to collect data from an informant, i.e., someone who knows the patient well such as a spouse, partner, roommate or parent. You can collect such data by sending home a rating scale or by having the patient bring an informant to a subsequent visit. Dr. Sibley’s paper also shows that you can avoid false negative diagnoses by using a lower symptom threshold than what is required in the diagnostic manual. In fact, the new DSM 5 lowered the symptom threshold for adults from six to five. Can you go lower? Yes, but it is essential to show that these symptoms lead to clear impairments in living. Importantly, this symptom threshold refers to the number of symptoms documented in adulthood, not to the number of symptoms retrospectively reported in childhood. To be diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, one must document that the patient had at least six impairing symptoms of ADHD prior to the age of 12.
REFERENCE
Sibley, M. H., Mitchell, J. T. & Becker, S. P. (2016). Method of adult diagnosis influences estimated persistence of childhood ADHD: a systematic review of longitudinal studies. Lancet Psychiatry 3, 1157-1165.
Jul 17, 2020 | Stephen Faraone, Ph.D.
Many myths have been manufactured about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Facts that are clear and compelling to most scientists and doctors have been distorted or discarded from popular media discussions of the disorder. Sometimes, the popular media seems motivated by the maxim “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” That’s fine for storytellers, but it is not acceptable for serious and useful discussions about ADHD.
Myths about ADHD are easy to find. These myths have confused patients and parents and undermined the ability for professionals to appropriately treat the disorder. When patients or parents get the idea that the diagnosis of ADHD is a subjective invention of doctors, or that ADHD medications cause drug abuse, that makes it less likely they will seek treatment and will increase their chances of having adverse outcomes.
Fortunately, as John Adams famously said of the Boston Massacre, “Facts are stubborn things.” And science is a stubborn enterprise; it does not tolerate shoddy research or opinions not supported by fact. ADHD scientists have addressed many of the myths about the disorder in the International Consensus Statement on ADHD, a published summary of scientific facts about ADHD endorsed by a of 75 international ADHD scientists in 2002. The statement describes evidence for the validity of ADHD, the existence of genetic and neurobiologic causes for the disorder and the range and severity of impairments caused by the disorder.
The Statement makes several key points:
- The U.S. Surgeon General, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recognize ADHD as a valid disorder.
- ADHD involves a serious deficiency in a set of psychological abilities and that these deficiencies pose serious harm to most individuals possessing the disorder.
- Many studies show that the psychological deficits in people with ADHD are associated with abnormalities in several specific brain regions.
- The genetic contribution to ADHD is routinely found to be among the highest for any psychiatric disorders.
- ADHD is not a benign disorder. For those it afflicts, it can cause devastating problems.
The facts about ADHD will prevail if you take the time to learn about them. This can be difficult when faced with a media blitz of information and misinformation about the disorder. In future blogs, I’ll separate the fact from the fiction by addressing several popular myths about ADHD.
Jul 10, 2020 | Stephen Faraone, Ph.D.
The stimulants methylphenidate and amphetamine are well known for their efficacy in treating symptoms of ADHD in both youth and adults. Although these medications have been used for several decade, relatively little is known about the mechanisms of action that lead to their therapeutic effect. New data about mechanism comes from a meta-analysis by Katya Rubia and colleagues. They analyzed 14 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data sets comprising 212 youth with ADHD. Each of these data sets assessed the short term effects of stimulants on fMRI assessed brain activations. In the fMRI paradigm, ADHD and control participants are asked to do a neurocognitive task while the activity of their brains is being measured. Dr. Rubia and colleagues analyzed data from fMRI assessments of time discrimination, inhibition and working memory, each of which are known to be deficient in ADHD patients. The meta-analysis found that the most consistent brain activations were seen in a region comprising the right inferior frontal cortex (IFC) and insula, even when the analysis was limited to previously medication naïve patients. The implicated region of the brain is known to mediate cognitive control, time estimation and attention. Dr. Rubia also notes that other studies show that the IFC/Insula is needed for updating information and allocating attention to relevant stimuli. Another region implicate by the meta-analysis was the right putamen, a region that is rich in dopamine transporters. This finding is consistent with the fact that the dopamine transporter is the main target of stimulant medications. What are the potential clinical implication of these findings? As Dr. Rubia and colleagues note, it is possible that the fMRI anomalies they identified could be used as a biomarker for ADHD or a biomarker to select patients who should respond optimally to stimulant medication. Although fMRI cannot be used as a clinical tool at this time, research of this sort is opening up new horizons for how we understand the etiology of ADHD and the mechanisms whereby medications exert their effects.
Reference
Rubia, K., Alegria, A. A., Cubillo, A. I., Smith, A. B., Brammer, M. J. & Radua, J. (2014). Effects of stimulants on brain function in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Biol Psychiatry 76, 616-28.
Jul 6, 2020 | Stephen Faraone, Ph.D.
By Stephen V. Faraone, PhD
The term “cognitive behavior therapy (CBT)” refers to a type of talk therapy that seeks to change the way patients think about themselves, their disorder and the world around them in a manner that will help them overcome symptoms and achieve life goals. Because CBT is typically administered by a psychologist or other mental health professionals, CBT services are not available in primary care. Nonetheless, it is useful for primary care practitioners to know about CBT so that they can refer appropriately as needed. So, what can we say about the efficacy of CBT for treating adults with ADHD. Based on a meta-analysis by Young and colleagues, we know for certain that the number of published trials of CBT for adult ADHD is small; only nine trials are available. Five of these compared CBT with waiting list controls; three compared CBT with appropriate placebo control groups. In all of these studies, patients in the CBT and control groups were also being treated with ADHD medications. Thus, they speak to the efficacy of CBT when given as an adjunctive treatment. The meta-analysis examined the waiting list controlled studies and the placebo controlled studies separately. For both types of study, the effect of CBT in reducing ADHD symptoms was statistically significant, with a standardized mean effect size of 0.4. This effect size, albeit modest, is large enough to conclude that CBT will be useful for some patients being treated with ADHD medications. Given these results, a reasonable guideline would be to refer adults with ADHD to a CBT therapist if they are being maintained on an ADHD medication but that medication is not leading to a complete remission of their symptoms and impairments. So listen to your patients. If, while on an appropriately titrated medication regime, they still complain about unresolved symptoms or impairments you need to take action. In some cases, changing their dose or shifting to another medication will be useful. If such approaches fail or are not feasible, you should consider referral to a CBT therapist.
REFERENCE
Young, Z., Moghaddam, N. & Tickle, A. (2016). The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Adults With ADHD: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. J Atten Disord.
