In my role, it’s obviously very important I keep up to date with all the latest on ADHD. Lately most of it has been focused around the ADHD medication shortage, or information about ADHD that most of us have known for years, for example, does diet affect ADHD or vice versa? Well yeah!!
However, recently I’ve seen two pieces of research that link to ADHD which is exciting to me for two reasons. Firstly, I’m a total nerd and have a background in both having ADHD and education so any new research that comes out related to these things and I’m all over it. Secondly, more is being done!!
Research on ADHD has been scarce because it’s such a subjective condition, that’s to say it affects each and every person with it differently. Now that awareness of it is being raised through more people being diagnosed with it meaning more support needed than more funding is being directed towards research for it.
“More research needs to be carried out on what ADHD is and how it effects people’s daily lives including the people around them.”
ADHD Girl
The first research article I saw (which I mentioned in the newsletter) is that ADHD may be an evolutionary coping mechanism that dates back to when we were cave people. I’ve often pondered on this myself because the impulsiveness of ADHD combined with the hyperactivity would have been great for hunting and not being hunted back when it was literally a dog-eat-dog world.
While this research is interesting and might have some of us thinking of ourselves as X-Men with a new mutant gene that helps us to conquer the world, I don’t think we should get too ahead of ourselves. If we are evolved then we are all still waiting for the rest of the world to catch up and adapt to our unique set of abilities.
The second piece of research linked a larger number of spoken words at an early age to ADHD. Can someone say, DUH?? If it’s one thing us ADHDer can do it’s talk and that’s because our brains are constantly thinking, but what was interesting about this study is that it then found that toddlers with ADHD (diagnosed later in life) found that their understanding of individual words was less than average. So again no surprises there; our brains can repeat things on autopilot but hey we don’t always understand what we’re saying….dangerous combination or what?
I’d love to do some independent research of my own at some point about ADHD, but for now I’m happy to hear all about other people’s work in the field and eagerly await the day when this research will transform into more and better support.
Have a good week ADHDers and allies!
