Her symptoms of inattention are significant enough to cause difficulty at school. This child has a plan at school with accommodations. She also works with a private organization coach to build skills. Her doctor and parents talked about medication.
But they decided her symptoms were mild enough that behavioral strategies would be enough to help her cope. Recent genetic studies have looked at attention skills in the general population.
One day genetic analysis may help us predict kids who will be at high risk for ADHD. For now, a diagnosis still depends on how severe the symptoms are. Evaluators use their clinical judgment to make that determination. And professionals consider where symptoms fall on the continuum to determine how to best help a child with ADHD. Read about what a proper ADHD evaluation should include. And find out what to do if your child was recently diagnosed with ADHD. These symptoms must be present in two or more settings for example, home, work, or school; with friends or relatives; in other activities and interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, school, or work functioning.
Adults who think they may have ADHD should talk to their health care provider. Primary care providers routinely diagnose and treat ADHD and may refer individuals to mental health professionals. Stress, other mental health conditions, and physical conditions or illnesses can cause similar symptoms to those of ADHD.
Therefore, a thorough evaluation by a health care provider or mental health professional is necessary to determine the cause of the symptoms and identify effective treatments. A health care provider or mental health professional may use standardized behavior rating scales or ADHD symptom checklists to determine whether an adult meets the criteria for a diagnosis of ADHD. An individual may complete psychological tests that look at working memory, executive functioning abilities such as planning and decision-making , visual and spatial related to space , or reasoning thinking skills.
Such tests can help identify psychological or cognitive thinking-related strengths and challenges and can be used to identify or rule out possible learning disabilities.
These adults may feel it is impossible to get organized, stick to a job, or remember to keep appointments. Daily tasks such as getting up in the morning, preparing to leave the house for work, arriving at work on time, and being productive on the job can be especially challenging for adults with undiagnosed ADHD.
These adults may have a history of problems with school, work, and relationships. Adults with ADHD may seem restless and may try to do several things at the same time—most of them unsuccessfully. They sometimes prefer quick fixes rather than taking the steps needed to gain greater rewards.
A person may not be diagnosed with ADHD until adulthood because teachers or family did not recognize the condition at a younger age, they had a mild form of ADHD, or they managed fairly well until they experienced the demands of adulthood, especially at work. Sometimes, young adults with undiagnosed ADHD have academic problems in college because of the intense concentration needed for college courses.
It is never too late to seek a diagnosis and treatment for ADHD and any other mental health condition that may occur with it.
Effective treatment can make day-to-day life easier for many adults and their families. Researchers are not sure what causes ADHD, although many studies suggest that genes play a large role.
Like many other disorders, ADHD probably results from a combination of factors. In addition to genetics, researchers are looking at possible environmental factors that might raise the risk of developing ADHD and are studying how brain injuries, nutrition, and social environments might play a role in ADHD.
Treatment for ADHD includes medication, therapy and other behavioral treatments, or a combination of methods. Stimulants are the most common type of medication used to treat ADHD. Different rating scales are designed to identify ADHD symptoms in various settings.
Intelligence tests are a standard part of most thorough neuropsychoeducational evaluations because they not only measure IQ but also may detect certain learning disabilities common in people with ADHD.
Broad-spectrum scales screen for social, emotional, and psychiatric problems, and they may be ordered if a doctor suspects her patient has anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder , or another condition in addition to ADHD. Tests of specific abilities — language development, vocabulary, memory recall, motor skills — screen for learning disabilities or other processing problems.
The doctor may recommend specific tests based, in part, on which kinds of tasks you or your child find easy or difficult. Computer tests are becoming popular because patients enjoy taking them, and because they can screen for attention and impulsivity problems, which are common in people with ADHD. A series of visual targets appear on the screen, and the user responds to prompts while the computer measures his or her ability to stay on task.
In practice, some experts have found that these tests are better at identifying impulsive symptoms and less successful at flagging symptoms of inattention. Brain scans. But their use in diagnosing ADHD has not yet been scientifically proven, and is not common. The best ADHD specialist — whether he or she is a psychiatrist, psychologist, pediatric neurologist, or general practitioner — will have had years of experience in diagnosing and treating ADHD.
The first meeting with an ADHD expert should be lengthy. It should start with a long discussion to help her get to know you or your child, and it should take a detailed look at the problems and challenges that led you to seek an evaluation. That is approximately Even during treatment, patients still have ADHD, and symptoms may return if treatment is discontinued or interrupted. Recommended treatment includes stimulant or non-stimulant medication, therapy, and some form of behavior modification.
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National Institute of Mental Health. Rochester, Minn. What is ADHD? American Psychiatric Association. National Alliance on Mental Illness. Adult ADHD attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
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