ADHD stimulants appear to work less by sharpening focus and more by waking up the brain. Brain scans revealed that these medications activate reward and alertness systems, helping children stay interested in tasks they would normally avoid. The drugs even reversed brain patterns linked to sleep deprivation. Researchers say this could complicate ADHD diagnoses if poor sleep is the real underlying problem.
edit here is another article
https://medicine.washu.edu/news/stimulant-adhd-medications-work-differently-than-thought/
This annoys me. Many articles about ADHD refer only to children with ADHD, not adults. I’m nearly fourty and I still have ADHD now, if I make it to 80 I will still have ADHD, why is it always about kids? It is lifelong not just a childhood thing.
because neurotypicals don’t actually care about how ADHD effects the people with it, just those who interact with them.
Because the DSM diagnosis and criteria are basically “let’s just take what applies to kids and apply it to adults, I guess” and wrongly so, there’s only a small field of research. The guy who effectively wrote the literature on adult adhd is Russell A. Barkley, and the APA pretty much blew him off at the time of the DSM-V publication. I suggest anyone check out his handbook (probably a quick search will get you a pdf version).
I suspect most adults have some coping mechanisms built up so its often harder to separate out the basic problems. Children offer a ‘cleaner’ study, so that is what they focus on.
I have to say my 6 year old has a lot of symptoms. I started giving her melatonin to help her sleep and a lot of the behavioral issues have gotten a lot better.
I’m not trying to say its a cure all, but I was surprised how well it helps her sleep, and how many (I thought) unrelated issues have improved.
why is it always about kids?
Because there’s still a strong misconception that people “grow out of” ADHD.
Btw, when you’re 80 you won’t have ADHD, you’ll have 80HD!
Neglect of focus on adult adhd seems to be a thing, eh?
The therapist who diagnosed me as an adult kept stressing that he will add scientific literature to his reports to support and justify his diagnosis of an adult for any future health care stuff I might have to deal with.
To examine how stimulants affect the brain, the researchers analyzed resting state functional MRI, or fMRI, data from 5,795 children ages 8 to 11 who took part in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Resting state fMRI measures brain activity when a person is not performing a specific task. The ABCD study is a long term, multisite project following the brain development of more than 11,000 children across the U.S., including a site at WashU Medicine.
It does study adults, we just have to wait
Even if it doesn’t bring anything novel having confirmed results is good in science.
Open access PDF of the study can be obtained here: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01373-X
Well it’s a good thing we make our kids get up at the crack of dawn to get to school. /s
It’s so annoying once you realize society intentionally forces children to learn at inopportune times because one of its main jobs is daycare. Doesn’t matter that delaying school by a couple hours would likely (only a correlation at this point) improve kids’ grades and overall well-being, that would mean impacting their parents and their jobs.
This lines up with my experience more. I never identified well with “you need help focusing, this medication does that and that’s why it helps you”. I have always been able to sit for half a dozen hours on an interesting thing and completely forget to eat or think about anything else. So it doesn’t make much sense to me that I have a focusing issue. I had been explaining my medication as “it takes the minimum level of reward the thing has to provide me for me to continue doing it, and drops it into the floor. So now everything is so rewarding that it doesn’t matter what it is, I can focus like I did with only a few things before”.
What exactly is new here?
Their findings suggest that these medications primarily affect brain systems involved in reward and wakefulness rather than the networks traditionally linked to attention.
I’m in my 40s and got diagnosed 2 years ago. One of the first things I learned is that ADHD has to do with dopamine deficit and that the stimulants either slow down the reduction of available dopamine or increase it’s release. And dopamine is a neurotransmitter directly connected with the reward center. And that’s one of the reason our attention changes focus all the time, because we’re looking for something new as the current task doesn’t release dopamine anymore. Yaddayadda you know the drill.
Plus I sleep better when taking meds so I don’t think stimulants work the same way for ADHDers as they do for neurotypicals.
Or is there something I completely missed?
Norepinephrine is another neurotransmitter highly implicated in ADHD.
Quoting from Wikipedia: Norepinephrine release is lowest during sleep, rises during wakefulness, and reaches much higher levels during situations of stress or danger, in the so-called fight-or-flight response. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal and alertness, promotes vigilance, enhances formation and retrieval of memory, and focuses attention; it also increases restlessness and anxiety.
The trouble of being to regulate wakefulness has been in my personal experience more pronounced than attention jumping around. But that’s likely fairly individual. I wouldn’t be surprised if the inattentive subtype & hyperactive subtype categories we use now were related to balance of these two.
Yeah this has been a known thing in psychiatry for years. My coworkers literally lol when I shake my coffee cup and announce that I don’t have enough dopamine to continue charting.
Maybe by “we” the author meant “the uninformed”?
Brain scans revealed that these medications activate reward and alertness systems
I’ve been taking ADHD medication for over a decade and was told this was how it works.
Of the many people that have tried to “inform” me about what they feel ADHD actually is. The majority seem to think you just grow out of it. Their lack of knowledge definitely doesn’t stop them from forming opinions.
It’s a complex subject hindered by lack of research and, frankly, a lot of prejudice.
The more I learn, the more I suspect it’s not that “the presentation” of ADHD changes magically as you age, it’s that people who grew up with it are neurologically shaped by having to compensate for so long under adverse conditions.
I recently read about a study attempting to establish a noninvasive treatment that stimulates under-active brain regions in kids to see if it can have a positive long term effect.
In the second phase, a subgroup of children with ADHD participated in a randomized, sham-controlled trial combining cognitive training with transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS), a painless, non-invasive form of electrical brain stimulation. The researchers targeted frontal brain regions involved in attention and self-control. After ten sessions, children who received active stimulation showed a significant reduction in the atypical brain signal, along with improvements in task performance. Importantly, some of the neural effects persisted 3 weeks after the intervention ended.
Food for thought, eh?
prejudice
I am already filled with guilt about the way things like executive dysfunction work. I don’t open up about the details of it with folks because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m lazy.
This makes a ton of sense seeing as most people with ADHD i’ve talked to/read their perspective is that ADHD fucks with their motivation.
Mine is depression. Absolutely nothing is rewarding because every job in my field is bullshit now. I’m too tired after work to enjoy anything. I’ve awakened tired every day of my life. Adderall is a lifesaver and I seriously would have killed myself if I had to be without it because I literally can’t function.
It doesn’t really match my experience though. I’m one of those rare ADHD folk who has zero issues with sleep.
Well they did say it was like that, not exactly that and also highlighted that it helped turn on reward centers. I’ve had a pretty consistent sleep schedule for the past couple years and getting good sleep didn’t resolve my issues with motivation. To be fair, adderall didn’t resolve them either (not a neuroscientist so no idea why).
In my experience the suppressing of the impulsive parts of my brain also suppressed my natural curiosity.
I can agree on being more alert but i feel the stay interested is assumption.
Strong contender for the worst scientific paper ever written. Literally nothing in there is a new finding at all.
