Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Doctor I have heard a lot of things, but I have question?
What actually causes attention deficit?
That's a good question Kurt and we have some research that is giving us some answers
we still a lot to learn about it, but we do have a good idea about what is going on in the brain.
I think I can probably explain it better if I draw a couple of things up here on the flip chart
We know that ADHD is inherited
We know that it responds to treatment with certain kinds of medication but not with other kinds of medication in most cases.
If you picture the brain and think of it a little bit bigger than a large grapefruit
In there you have a hundred billion neurons
those are the cells that make up most of the brain
and they come in different sizes and shapes but they all work on a branches and twigs system like this
the thing that is amazing about them is that if you look at any one of them
it's going to be connected to over a thousand others
but the thing that is amazing about it is that it is not wired together.
and if you look at the connections between these things they all look like this
like two mushroom heads, butted up against each other
with a space thinner than a piece of tissue paper inbetween
and the whole thing works on low voltage electrical current
as a message comes along there is constant flow of messages
this electric impulses, low voltage electric currents
coming along here, has to jump this gap like a spark plug
hit a receptor button on the other side and ....
fires down into the next segment
and all of this is done quickly in one millisecond,
one thousandth of a second you can get twelve messages across here.
It's all done with chemicals.
The brain makes fifty different chemicals and each one of these neurons works on one of them.
So whichever chemical this one is working on is going to be made in the brain
its going to be located in little bubbles next to the edge
so when the electrical impulse comes, it releases microdots of the chemical
that's what crosses the gap, hits the receptor, fires it to send the message on
and then the remainder of the chemical gets sucked into the sending cell
and the system reloads in fractions of a second.
What we believe happens with people who have ADD is that there are two different neuro-transmitter chemicals
Dopamine and Norapinephrine
that everybody has, people with ADD makes them the same way everybody else's brain does
but they just don't release and reload effectively.
What we know is that for about 80% of the people who have ADHD
if you give them the right amount of the right medication it helps to facilitate this
the medicines that we have right now cure nothing.
It's not like you have a strep throat and it just knocks out the infection
It's more like my glasses; I have a problem with my eyes where I can't read typewriter size print without my glasses
if I put these on I can read it about as well as anybody can
take them off, I am right back where I started from
the glasses don't fix my eyes, they just help me see better when I have them in place.
the same thing is true for people who have ADHD
the medicine doesn't cure the problem,
but it does help to alleviate the symptoms if its properly managed
during the time when it's actually in place.