Adult ADHD: Common Problems and Symptoms

ADHD in children is a little more obvious and easier to detect. As the name suggests, attention deficit hyperactive disorder is a condition characterized by the inability to sit still, pay attention for prolonged periods of time, or controlling one's impulses. Come adolescence and adulthood, the hyperactive ADHD symptoms tend to get replaced by a host of other problems related to behavior, mood, and productivity. Adult ADHD still comes with difficulties paying attention, remembering information, and completing tasks. However, the disorder is also more likely to cause the following related problems if the person does not seek help immediately.

Relationship problems

All couples experience problems at some point in their relationship, but having ADHD tends to complicate these issues. ADHD symptoms can be very erratic - an adult with ADHD may be extremely open and loving one day but hyperfocused in a couple of hours. This can be very confusing for a partner to deal with, especially when their loved one suddenly seems cold or distant for no reason. Adults with ADHD also tend to have short fuses that can be set off by almost anything. The partner of such an adult is often left confused and angry about the outbursts that seem to occur from out of nowhere. It's hardly surprising that adults with ADHD tend to have more marital problems, multiple marriages, and higher incidences of divorce or separation.

Career problems

An adult with ADHD faces a lot of challenges at work. Poor time management, disorganization, and distractibility are just some of the symptoms that can impair one's productivity and performance. Even symptoms like interrupting others or blurting blunt statements can make a negative impact on one's relationship with co-workers and colleagues. All of these traits increase one's risk of losing a promotion or getting fired.

Another problem adults with ADHD contend with at work is their need for stimulation and excitement. Almost every job requires doing mundane, repetitive tasks, which can trigger boredom that sidetracks the adult and causing his or her performance to suffer. For these reasons, adults with ADHD are likely to change employers frequently or have fewer occupational achievements.

It's important for adults with ADHD to be able to find work they consider interesting. Once they find a job they feel passionate about, their performance usually soars and their symptoms seem to have a smaller impact on their work.

Emotional problems

Adults with ADHD are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, low frustration tolerance, and mood swings. Experts believe that these emotional problems are either caused by ADHD themselves or their difficulties dealing with the symptoms. These problems also increase the risk of substance abuse or addiction, getting into motor vehicle accidents, impulsive shopping, or eating disorders.

Adult ADHD can be treated

Reading this list of problems might sound a bit discouraging, but adults with ADHD don't have to be slaves to their symptoms forever. There are many treatment options available to adults, from medication to behavior therapy. While ADHD cannot be outgrown, adults can learn to adapt and work around their symptoms so they can develop their strengths and live productive, meaningful lives.

Dr. Yannick Pauli is an expert on natural approaches to ADHD and the author of the popular self-help home-program The Unritalin Solution. He is Director of the Centre Neurofit in Lausanne, Switzerland and has a passion taking care of children with ADHD. Click on the link for more great information about what is adhd.

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Adult day care services provide much-needed break to family caregivers

ScienceDaily (July 18, 2011) — Adult day care services significantly reduce the stress levels of family caregivers of older adults with dementia, according to a team of Penn State and Virginia Tech researchers.

"Family members who care for dementia patients are susceptible to experiencing high levels of stress," said Steven Zarit, professor and head, department of human development and family studies, Penn State. "One way of alleviating that stress is through the use of an adult day care center, which allows them a predictable break from caregiving responsibilities."

Not only do caregivers benefit from using such services, but dementia patients also gain from the break. Zarit and his colleagues showed that dementia patients who attend adult day care centers have fewer behavior problems and sleep better at night.

"The changes we have seen are as large as you'd get with medication, but with no side effects," he said.

Zarit and his team evaluated the stress levels of 150 caregivers by using a 24-hour daily diary to obrain obtain baseline information prior to the use of an adult day care service. After the caregivers began the use of an adult daycare, the researchers gathered data at various times over a two-month period. The caregivers recorded entries in their diaries, both on days when their relatives went to an adult day care service and on days when their relatives stayed home. The researchers reported their results online in the Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences.

"In the diaries, we asked the caregivers to discuss their moods and the moods of their relatives, how agitated or restless their relatives were, and how many sleep disturbances their relatives had, among other topics," said Zarit.

The team's results revealed that caregivers generally reported greater levels of stress exposure prior to the use of an adult day care service and on days when their relatives did not attend adult day care programs. The team also found that behavior problems and poor sleep were more likely to occur on days when dementia patients remained at home.

Zarit and his colleagues are now studying the possible physiological effects these services can have on family caregivers. They are using stress markers, such as the stress hormone cortisol, to examine the body's response to high-stress days when relatives with dementia stay home versus low-stress ones when relatives with dementia attend adult day care centers.

Other Penn State researchers involved in the study include Kyungmin Kim, graduate student, human development and family studies; Elia Femia, research associate, human development and family studies; David Almeida, professor of human development and family studies, and Peter Molenaar, professor of human development and psychology.

Also part of the study was Jyoti Savla, assistant professor of human development and gerontology, Virginia Tech.

National Institute of Mental Health supported this work.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Penn State.

Journal Reference:

S. H. Zarit, K. Kim, E. E. Femia, D. M. Almeida, J. Savla, P. C. M. Molenaar. Effects of Adult Day Care on Daily Stress of Caregivers: A Within-Person Approach. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbr030

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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Fear boosts activation of immature brain cells: Adult neural stem cells play role in creating emotional context of memory

ScienceDaily (June 15, 2011) — Fear burns memories into our brain, and new research by University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists explains how.

Scientists have long known that fear and other highly emotional experiences lead to incredibly strong memories. In a study appearing online in advance of publication in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, UC Berkeley's Daniela Kaufer and colleagues report a new way for emotions to affect memory: The brain's emotional center, the amygdala, induces the hippocampus, a relay hub for memory, to generate new neurons.

In a fearful situation, these newborn neurons get activated by the amygdala and may provide a "blank slate" to strongly imprint the new fearful memory, she said. In evolutionary terms, it means new neurons are likely helping you to remember the lion that nearly killed you.

"We remember emotional events much more strongly than daily experiences, and for a long time we have known that connections between the amygdala and hippocampus help to encode this emotional information," said Kaufer, an assistant professor of integrative biology and a member of UC Berkeley's Wills Neuroscience Institute. "Our research shows that amygdala input actually pushes the hippocampus to make new neurons from a unique population of neural stem cells. This provides completely new cells that get activated in response to emotional input."

The finding has implications for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other problems caused by faulty regulation of emotional memory.

"Many affective disorders involve disordered emotional memories like PTSD, depression and anxiety. We think that newborn neurons may play a role in creating these emotional memories," she said.

The finding comes a year after brain researcher Fred Gage at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., showed that the formation of new memories is associated with increased activation of two-week-old newborn nerve cells in the hippocampus that are derived from adult neural stem cells. Adult stem cells appear to differentiate continually into new nerve cells -- nearly 100 each day -- yet half of those newborn neurons are slated for death within four weeks after their birth. If they are highly activated, however -- such as in learning new complex information -- many more of them will survive and presumably help in establishing new memories in the brain.

Kaufer, who conducts research on the effects of stress on the brain, knew that many types of positive and negative experiences, such as exercise and stress, affect the rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus. Along with graduate students Elizabeth Kirby, the lead author of the study, and Aaron Friedman, she was intrigued by the idea that emotions might affect neurogenesis in the hippocampus, since the brain's clearinghouse for emotions, the amygdala, is connected to the hippocampus via multiple neural circuits. To test this, Kirby focused on the basolateral amygdala, the region of the almond-shaped structure that handles negative emotions, including stress, anxiety and fear.

Using rats, Kirby surgically destroyed the basolateral amygdala and discovered that the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus decreased. To make sure that the cell damage created when the amygdala was surgically destroyed was not affecting the experiment, the researchers borrowed a gene therapy technique from Robert Sapolsky's lab at Stanford University to genetically introduce potassium channels into the amygdala, which shut down the activity of the nerve cells without causing injury. This also decreased neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

They next tested Gage's theory that new neurons are especially sensitive to input two weeks after they form. Kirby and Kaufer labeled hippocampal cells created over a three-day period in a group of rats, and then conditioned a fear response in these rats two weeks later. They then confronted the rats with the same fearful situation or a neutral yet novel context the next day. When they examined the brains, they found that the newborn neurons had been specifically activated by the fearful situation. However, when they destroyed the basolateral amygdala, new neurons were no longer activated in response to the fearful memory.

"The research suggests that newborn neurons play a role not only in the formation of memory, but also in helping to create the emotional context of memory," Kirby said. It also suggests that the basolateral amygdala drives the ability of new neurons to be part of an emotional memory.

The team now plans to see whether other negative stimuli, such as stress and anxiety, similarly cooperate with amygdala activity to alter neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

The coauthors of the paper with Kaufer, Kirby and Friedman are UC Berkeley graduate student David Covarrubias and undergraduates Carl Ying and Wayne G. Sun; Ki Ann Goosens, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Stanford's Sapolsky.

Kaufer's work is funded by a 2010 BRAINS (Biobehavioral Research Awards for Innovative New Scientists) award from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health and a young investigator award from The Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, formerly the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). Kirby is supported by a California Institute for Regenerative Medicine pre-doctoral fellowship and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Research fellowship from the U. S. Department of Defense.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of California - Berkeley. The original article was written by Robert Sanders, Media Relations.

Journal Reference:

E D Kirby, A R Friedman, D Covarrubias, C Ying, W G Sun, K A Goosens, R M Sapolsky, D Kaufer. Basolateral amygdala regulation of adult hippocampal neurogenesis and fear-related activation of newborn neurons. Molecular Psychiatry, 2011; DOI: 10.1038/mp.2011.71

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

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