Teachers are important partners to health professionals in identifying and managing children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, they may be over-identifying children with possible ADHD diagnoses.
Diagnostic criteria for ADHD require that the symptoms are present both at school and at home. School assessments are generally carried out by rating scales and school reports. [continue reading…]
ADHD
Stimulant medications such as Ritalin have been prescribed for decades to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and their popularity as “cognition enhancers” has recently surged among the healthy, as well.
What’s now starting to catch up is knowledge of what these drugs actually do in the brain. In a paper publishing online this week in Biological Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology researchers David Devilbiss and Craig Berridge report that Ritalin fine-tunes the functioning of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) — a brain region involved in attention, decision-making and impulse control — while having few effects outside it. [continue reading…]
The brains of kids with ADHDÂ mature a few years later than other kids, but they catch up in the end.
Source: Discover Magazine
Children with autism and ADHD may soon get anxiety relief from a novel “deep-pressure” vest developed by Brian Mullen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The vest, which can also be used for adults with mental illness, delivers a “portable hug” called deep pressure touch stimulation (DPTS). [continue reading…]
