Another study Claims effective reduction of ADHD 'Symptoms' using Vitamins

A recent study suggest that vitamins and minerals could be useful for treating the 'symptoms' of ADHD.

As we know, the condition itself is a neurological disorder with no effective cure or treatment.

The small scale study claims that adults with ADHD, given supplements for eight weeks had a "modest" improvement in their concentration span, hyperactivity, and other 'symptoms.'

"A wide range of nutrients, including vitamin D, iron and calcium, may improve brain function." said psychologists in New Zealand.

Another study claims to have found that medication reduced road accidents in men with ADHD.

As many as one in 20 adults has a form of ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), marked by symptoms such as lack of attention, concentration difficulties and impulsiveness.

A variety of medications are prescribed to treat the symptoms of ADHD, such as central nervous system stimulants, which affect brain function and allegedly, improves symptoms.

According to the research, published in The British Journal of Psychiatry (JAMA), taking a broad range of vitamins and minerals may also help reduce ADHD symptoms.

In the study, 80 adults with ADHD were given either supplements containing vitamin D, vitamin B12, folate, magnesium, ferritin, iron, calcium, zinc and copper, or a dummy pill.

After eight weeks of treatment those on supplements reported greater improvements in both their inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity compared with those taking the placebo.

Julia Rucklidge

Psychologists from the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, say the effects of vitamins and minerals (micronutrients) are more modest than medication but may be useful for some people, particularly those seeking alternative treatments.

"Our study may provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness for micronutrients in the treatment of ADHD symptoms in adults," said Prof Julia Rucklidge, who led the study.

"This could open up symptom treatment options for people with ADHD who may not tolerate medications, or do not respond to first-line treatments."

Philip Asherson

Prof Philip Asherson, professor in molecular psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, was unconvinced.

He said the suggestion that vitamins and minerals improved brain metabolism was intriguing but needed further investigation.

"It's an interesting study, but it really needs replicating," he told reporters. "The mechanisms behind ADHD and its associated symptoms, remain unclear."

Road accidents
Meanwhile, a separate study on ADHD in Sweden suggests medication could save lives on the road.

Research indicated almost half of transport accidents involving men with ADHD could be avoided if they were taking medication for their condition.

Scientists from the Karolinska Institute studied 17,000 individuals with ADHD over a period of four years using data from health registers.

They found individuals with ADHD had a higher risk of being involved in serious transport accidents, such as car or motorcycle crashes, compared with those without ADHD.

Transport accidents were lower among men with ADHD who were on medication than among men with ADHD who did not take medication.

Calculations showed 41% of transport accidents involving men with ADHD could have been avoided if they had received medication and carried on taking it during the course of the study.

A similar effect was not found in women. It is known that ADHD and its associated symptoms affect men and women differently.

Henrik Larsson

"Even though many people with ADHD are doing well, our results indicate that this serious nerological disorder may have very serious consequences," said Henrik Larsson, associate professor at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

"Our study also demonstrates in several different ways that the risk of transport accidents in adult men with ADHD decreases markedly if their condition is treated with medication."

The effect of ADHD on road accidents research is published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Autism: Does Impaired Attention explain Autism symptoms?

Autism is marked by several core features—impairments in social functioning, difficulty communicating, and a restriction of interests.

Though researchers have attempted to pinpoint factors that might account for all three of these characteristics, the underlying causes are still unclear.

Now, a new study suggests that two key attentional abilities—moving attention fluidly and orienting to social information—can be checked off the list, as neither seems to account for the diversity of symptoms we find in people with autism.

Kami Koldewyn

"This is not to say that every aspect of attention is fine in all children with autism—children with autism very often have attentional disorders as well," explain psychological scientists and lead researchers Jason Fischer and Kami Koldewyn of MIT.

"However, our study suggests that attention impairments are not a key component of autism itself."

The study is published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Attention has long been targeted as a possible causal mechanism in autism research: "Problems with attention early in life could have far-reaching consequences," say Fischer and Koldewyn.

"For example, if young children with autism don't pay close attention to the behaviours of the people around them, they might never learn to read body language and other social cues."

But much of the previous research on attention, social learning, and autism had been mixed.

"Some of the most fundamental questions remain debated," Fischer and Koldewyn explain.

Jason Fischer

"Our goal was to conduct careful, systematic, relatively large-scale studies of some of the mental processes most often implicated in autism to discover which of them are actually disrupted in autism and which are not."

To investigate this, Fischer, Koldewyn, and their team had children with high-functioning autism and children without autism complete an attention task while tracking their eye movements.

Critically, the participants were matched on age and IQ before participating in the study to rule out the possible influence of global developmental delays that aren't specific to autism.

The task was intended to answer two questions:

• Are children with autism less able to re-orient to a new stimulus (a plausible precursor of restricted interests)? and,
• Are children with autism slower to respond to social stimuli, such as faces?

Overall, children with and without autism showed clear signatures of shifting attention and orienting to social stimuli, but there was no difference in either ability between the two groups, challenging the hypothesis that impaired attention might be at the root of autism symptoms.

Fischer and Koldewyn underscore that these aren't simply null results—they do contribute in a meaningful way to our understanding of autism.

"Understanding which mental capacities are intact in autism is not only encouraging, but also helps families and educators design effective interventions to work on those cognitive skills that are true areas of weakness in autism."

While finding those true cognitive impairments, and their antecedents, has proved difficult, it's not for lack of effort.

"We believe that the crux of autism lies in a difficulty interpreting the nuanced and complex information present in real life social situations," Fischer and Koldewyn conclude.

"We plan to test children with autism in more natural scenarios than the typical laboratory environment in order to understand how social context interacts with attentional abilities in autism."

Dyslexia: Recognition in Symptoms but little Progress in Treatment

Despite advances in medical treatments for dyslexia over the past five years, not enough is being done to understand the causes of the condition to help kids struggling to read, concludes a seminar published online in The Lancet today.

Most children are only diagnosed with dyslexia after they have experienced serious difficulties in school, at a time when it is much harder for them to master new skills, and this could be thwarting their ability to fully realise their potential, say the authors.

“Professionals should not wait until children are formally diagnosed with dyslexia or experience repeated failures before implementation of reading treatment, because remediation is less effective than early intervention”, explain Robin Peterson and Bruce Pennington from the University of Denver in Colorado, USA.

About 7% of the population are dyslexic, and boys are about twice as likely to have dyslexia as girls. Mounting evidence suggests that the underlying problem involves difficulty with how sounds in language are heard and mapped onto letters — phonological impairment.

“Like all behaviourally defined disorders, the cause of dyslexia is multifactorial and is associated with multiple genes and environmental risk factors”, explain the authors.

Despite the recent identification of six genes that contribute to the disorder, very little is known about how these and other possible genetic determinants might contribute to dyslexia or the role of the environment in the cause of the condition.

Further research is needed to hunt out further genes that may contribute to dyslexia, and to find which gene locations are shared and not shared with associated disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), say the authors.

The impact of environmental risk factors, such as the language and pre-literacy stimulus parents provide for their children also warrant further investigation, they say.

“We still need to learn more about the nature of phonological deficit and how this problem interacts with other linguistic and non-linguistic risk factors, the developmental course of neural abnormalities and how these predict treatment response, and which environmental risk factors contribute to the development of poor reading and whether these are the same across demographic groups”, they explain.

Treatment still needs to be improved, they add. “Brain-imaging studies have shown that effective intervention seems to promote normalisation of activity in the left hemisphere reading and language network that has shown reduced activity in dyslexia.”

Common coexisting conditions such as ADHD, language impairment, and speech sound disorder, which are likely to be apparent much earlier, could be used to help predict a child’s risk of later reading problems, conclude the authors, adding that: “Many effective treatments are low cost, which further draws attention to the importance of early identification, prevention, and treatment of dyslexia for public health.”

Painkiller Addiction Increasingly Common In Newborns

When you picture a person going through painkiller withdrawals, a baby crying in his crib is usually not the first image that comes to mind. But the number of babies born with withdrawal symptoms has skyrocketed since 2000, according to a new study.

In 2000, approximately 4,300 babies were born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, a condition that occurs in some babies that were exposed to opiates such as heroin, Vicodin and oxycodone in the womb, according to the study. In 2009, the number jumped 300 percent to 13,000.

"That's about one baby per hour," Dr. Stephen Patrick, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, told CNN. "We were surprised by it. That's a startling increase."

Opiates used by an expectant mother during pregnancy pass through the placenta and into the baby. The babies' bodies become dependent on the drugs but no longer have access to them once they are born, triggering withdrawal. Between 55 percent and 94 percent of babies exposed to the drugs before birth show signs of withdrawal once they are born, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Signs of withdrawal unique to infants include a distinct, high-pitched cry and an aversion to light and sound. They may also show symptoms similar to adult withdrawal patients, such as insomnia, diarrhea and vomiting.

Doctors use methadone, a drug used by addicts looking to kick the habit, to wean the babies off of the drugs slowly. Making them go cold-turkey could lead to seizures and possibly death, according to the study.

Getting the babies over their addiction could take weeks or even months and often requires long-term hospitalization. The cost of treating drug-addicted babies increased from $190 million in 2000 to $720 million in 2009, according to the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Monday.

The increase in opiate-addicted babies is a product of growing numbers of adults who abuse painkillers.. More than two-thirds of patients prescribed painkillers abuse them by taking them too often or by taking them in conjunction with other painkillers not prescribed to them, according to research published by Quest Diagnostics.

In addition, two million people in 2010 admitted to abusing prescription painkillers for the first time -- almost 5,500 per day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tennessee had the highest rate of painkiller abuse between 2007 and 2008, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It also has one of the highest rates of opiate-addicted newborns. At East Tennessee Children's Hospital, almost 50 percent of the babies in the neonatal intensive care unit are experiencing withdrawals.

"In Knox County, we're drowning," Susan Kovac, attorney for the Department of Children's Services in Tennessee, told CNN. "We've seen the number of children in foster care increase by almost 50 percent over the last few years, and that's just the tip of the iceberg because we're trying to keep the children out of foster care. We've got lots and lots of relatives who are raising drug-exposed infants."

Florida also experienced a surge in the number of addicted babies, which increased from 354 in 2006 to 1,374 in 2010, according to the study.

The researchers call for individual states and the Federal government to take action to reduce the amount of painkillers prescribed and say educating the public about the dangers of using the drugs while pregnant may also help. Cutting the number of prescriptions of opiates could drastically reduce the number of babies born with NAS, according to the study.

"Newborns with NAS experience longer, often medically complex and costly initial hospitalizations," the researchers wrote in the study. "The increasing incidence of NAS and its related health care expenditures call for increased public health measures to reduce [in utero] exposure to opiates across the United States."

Free Vision and Learning Guide - Download

Dr. Kellye Knueppel noted that what a client's daughter was experiencing was not uncommon. Letter and /or word reversal.

“From approximately age 5 to age 11, directionality concepts are developing, so reversals are normal at younger ages,” she said. 

Dr. Knueppel also shared that educators are usually taught that reversals are normal until age 8, and typically, no action is taken even if the child at ages 6 or 7 reverses things more frequently than his or her peers.

“We have tests to determine if the amount of reversals the child is doing is actually age appropriate or not,” Dr. Knueppel said. 

“If it is, we would just monitor the situation. If the reversals are more frequent than they should be, we would work on laterality and directionality concepts.”

If you notice frequent reversals, as she did with her client's daughter, consider a Functional Vision Test. 

You may find out that, as Dr. Knueppel noted, your child’s word reversals are normal.  However, if you find there is a problem, you can pursue the treatment that will allow for healthy visual development.

The Vision and Learning Guide is filled with information that can help parents and teachers determine if a child has a vision problem.

It provides an overview of how vision can impact learning, and includes:

• The Vision Quiz to help you quickly assess a child's symptoms.
• Samples of what schoolwork looks like from a person with vision problems.
• Classroom stress points and modifications to help students.
• Links to studies on the efficacy of vision therapy.

The Vision and Learning Guide provides the critical first step to determining if a child has a vision problem.

Download Your Free Vision and Learning Guide

Neurological Dysfunction as a Significant Factor in Children Diagnosed with Dyslexia

Dyslexia

Dyslexia has been defined as, "a disorder in children who, despite conventional classroom experience, fail to attain the language skills of reading, writing and spelling commensurate with their intellectual abilities" (World Federation of Neurology 1968). More recently this definition has been expanded and described as, "a complex neurological condition which is constitutional in origin.

The symptoms may affect many areas of learning and function and may be described as a specific difficulty in reading, spelling and written language. One or more of these areas may be affected. Numeracy, notational skills (music), motor function and organisational skills. However, it is particularly related to mastering written language, although oral language may be affected to some degree (British Dyslexia Association, 1998).

Associated Symptoms:

In addition to problems with reading, spelling and written language expression, dyslexic children often manifest problems with motor skills such as hopping and skipping, catching and throwing a ball; learning to ride a bicycle, coordination at gym and sometimes swimming; problems with directionality, such as telling left from right, laying a table correctly and telling the time from an analogue clock.

Problems with fine muscle skills may include difficulties tying shoelaces, doing buttons up and manipulating a writing instrument. Sequencing, visual memory and auditory perception may also be affected and there may be ambiguity of laterality (Ott, 1997). Performance in these areas is dependent upon the maturity of the reflex system which underlies motor learning, vestibular functioning and kinesthetic integration.

Reflex abnormalities affect performance in automatic balance, posture and motor skills. For example, a retained Tonic Labyrinthine Reflex will affect balance and distribution of muscle tone depending on head position in relation to the midplane; If the Asymmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex is retained it will affect hand-eye coordination, ability of the hand and sometimes the eyes to cross the vertical midline and the development of cross pattern movements.

A retained Symmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex can affect both sitting posture and coordination because it creates a horizontal midline barrier within the body which interferes with integration between upper and lower sections of the body. If the Palmar Reflex remains, it will affect the development of fine finger movements, particularly the ability to hold a writing instrument in a tripod grip. These basic motor abilities are fundamental to many of the skills required for academic learning.

Eye movements may also be affected as a result of the links between the labyrinths and the eyes via the vestibular-ocular-reflex arc (VOR). Neurological connections also exist between the vestibular and the auditory systems.

Although these two systems are considered separately, the cochlear and the semi-circular canals of the vestibular apparatus adjoin within the inner ear, they share the same fluid and a common pathway for the transmission of signals to the brain along the 8th cranial nerve. Dysfunction in one system can affect the processing and perception of information from the other.

More.....

Primary symptoms of psychosis may be evident in 12-year-olds

Children normally experience flights of fancy, including imaginary friends and conversations with stuffed animals, but some of them are also having hallucinations and delusions which might be the early signs of psychosis.

A study of British 12-year-olds that asked whether they had ever seen things or heard voices that weren't really there, and then asked careful follow-up questions, has found that nearly 6 percent may be showing at least one definite symptom of psychosis.

The children who exhibited these symptoms had many of the same risk factors that are known to correlate with adult schizophrenia, including genetic, social, neurodevelopmental, home-rearing and behavioral risks.

"We don't want to be unduly alarmist, but this is also not something to dismiss," said co-author Terrie Moffitt, the Knut Schmidt Nielsen professor of psychology and neuroscience and psychiatry & behavioral sciences at Duke University. The study appears in the April issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

The children were participants in the long-term Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study in Britain, which includes 2,232 children who have been tracked since age 5 and reassessed at 7, 10 and 12.

The British study is an outgrowth of research that the same group did earlier with a long-term cohort in Dunedin, New Zealand. At age 11, those children were asked about psychotic symptoms, but the researchers waited 15 years to see how, as adults, their symptoms matched what they reported at 11. By age 26, half of the people who self-reported symptoms at age 11 were found to be psychotic as adults.

"It looks like a non-trivial minority of children report these symptoms," said co-author Avshalom Caspi, the Edward M. Arnett professor of psychology and neuroscience and psychiatry & behavioral sciences at Duke.

The findings provide more clues to the development of schizophrenia, but don't solve any questions by themselves, said co-author Richard Keefe, director of the schizophrenia research group in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke.

Schizophrenia often goes undetected until adolescence, when the first overt symptoms -- antisocial behavior, self-harm, delusions -- begin to manifest in an obvious way. But nobody knows whether the disease is triggered by the process of adolescence itself, or brain development or hormone changes. "It's my impression that all of those things interact," Keefe said.

Psychotic symptoms in childhood also can be a marker of impaired developmental processes, and are something caregivers should look for, Moffitt said. "There is not much you can do except monitoring and surveillance," Moffitt said. "But we feel we should be alerting clinicians that there's a minority to pay attention to."

While the incidence of psychotic symptoms in this study was around 5 or 6 percent, the adult incidence of schizophrenia is believed to be about 1 percent, Keefe added. There are some recent findings however, that many more people experience hallucinations and delusions without being diagnosed as psychotic, he said.

The research was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, UK Medical Research Council, The National Alliance of Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Health Research Board of Ireland and the William T. Grant Foundation.

Etiological and Clinical Features of Childhood Psychotic Symptoms, Guilherme Polanczyk et al, Archives of General Psychiatry, April 2010 http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/67/4/328

Link: http://www.duke.edu/

7 Signs that your Pre-School Child may have Dyslexia

Mothers are Great!
Mothers are very perceptive when it comes to their children and they instinctively know when there is something wrong. Doctors, paediatricians and teachers should ignore this at their peril.

The close bond between a mother and her child is one of the understated wonders of the natural world and one that we need to pay more atention to.

Learning issues
If you, as a mother, suspect that your child is having difficulties with vocalising, or speaking, especially about letters and words, then go with those feelings and seek good qualified expert advise.

What's the worst that can happen? 1) If your fears are unfounded then that's good news and you will be more content. 2) If your child does have an issue, then you have done well to find it early and that is also good. The sooner you start helping, the better it gets.

Sharing and Empathy
Yes, you can share your concerns with your friends and their friends but unless they have the right level of expertise, then it is only helping you on a 'sharing and empathising' level.

I am not saying you should stop sharing concerns with your friends and family. Oh no, not at all. What I am saying, is it is not necessarily going to help you make progress with defining the issue or go in the right direction to help with it.

It is normally better to seek out a more qualified and objective opinion or diagnosis, before you attempt remedial action. They will be in a better position to define the issues and to help you address them.

Possible Signs of Dyslexia
Let me give you a list of the types of symptoms or behaviours that would make you believe your child had a difficulty with understanding letters and words. Your child has difficulties with the following;

• Identifying the sounds at the beginning and end of words
• Detecting or recognising when you are using rhyming sounds and words
• Identifying or rembering some letters from the alphabet
• Recognising or detecting words on signs e.g. Parking, Stop, Exit, etc.
  
• Vocalising or describing a story that you know they know e.g. something they have done or a journey they have been on.
  
• Recognising their name when you write it down
• Writing their own name

Let me know if this has helped you in any way and above all trust your own instincts as a mother but don't panic. Enjoy the support of your family and friends but seek out good advice wherever and whenever you can. Ask the school to help you and your child prepare for the future.

Homeopathy - Didn't realise there is nothing in it

The 10:23 'overdose' event

What is Homeopathy?

Contrary to popular belief, 'homeopathy' is not the same as herbal medicine. Homeopathy is based on three central tenets, unchanged since their invention by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796.

The Law of Similars

The law of similars states that whatever would cause your symptoms, will also cure those same symptoms. Thus, if you find yourself unable to sleep, taking caffeine will help; streaming eyes due to hayfever can be treated with onions, and so on. This so-called law was based upon nothing other than Hahnemann's own imagination. You don't need to have a medical degree to see the flawed reasoning in taking caffeine - a stimulant - to help you sleep; yet caffeine is, even today, prescribed by homeopaths (under the name 'coffea') as a treatment for insomnia.

The Law of Infinitesimals

Following on from his 'law of similars', Hahnemann proposed he could improve the effect of his 'like-cures-like treatments' by repeatedly diluting them in water. The more dilute the remedy, Hahnemann decided, the stronger it will become. Thus was born his 'Law of Infinitesimals'.

Taking a single drop of caffeine and diluting in ninety-nine drops of water creates what is known to homeopaths as one 'centesimal'. One drop of this centesimal added to another ninety-nine drops of water produces a two-centesimal, written as 2C. This 2C caffeine potion is 99.99% water and just 0.01% caffeine. At 3C the dilution is 0.0001% caffeine, at 4C it's 0.000001% caffeine, and so on. Homeopathic remedies are commonly sold at 6C (0.000 000 000 1%) and even 30C (0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1%) dilutions, which homeopaths will often drip onto little balls of sugar to sell.

When these numbers are written out, it's easy to see how absurd they are. At 12C you pass what is known as the Avogadro Limit, the point at which there is likely nothing of your original substance left.

By the time you reach 30C, you have more chance of winning the lottery five weeks running than you have of finding a single caffeine molecule in your homeopathic sleeping draft. It's just ordinary water, dripped onto ordinary sugar.

The Law of Succussion

While transporting his remedies on a horse-drawn carriage, Hahnemann made another 'breakthrough'. He decided that the vigorous shaking of a homeopathic remedy would further increase its potency. This shaking process was named 'succussion'. When ritually preparing a homeopathic remedy, the homeopath will shake or tap the preparation at each stage of dilution, in order to 'potentize' it.

Modern homeopaths believe that this 'potentization' process allows the water to retain the 'memory' or 'vibrations' of the original substance, long after it has been diluted away to nothing. Of course, there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that water has such an ability, nor any indication of how it might be able to use this 'memory' to cure a sick patient.

Autism: Is there really an increase diagnosis

According to a recent study by The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) the rate of autism in the US has jumped 40% from 1 in 154 to 1 in 110 between 2002 and 2006.

The study also found that ASD was 4 to 5 times higher in boys than in girls. The CDC estimates 1 in 70 boys and 1 in 315 girls have an ASD.

What accounts for this staggering increase?
The CDC admits that they can isolate no one factor at this time, without further research and conclusive evidence.

Recent developments in earlier detection might account for the rise in autism diagnoses and the CDC confirms that improved community awareness, the widening of diagnostic criteria to include more mild cases and out right earlier identification have added to this increase.

So the CDC are keen to acknowledge that is not yet conclusive that the condition is on such a steep rise, but the recognition of symptoms and labeling has drastically increased.

The AAP
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends systematically screening children for autism at 18 months and 24 months even when a concern or risk is not conclusively recognised. Their philosophy is to screen children early and often.

However, parents are either the first to identify symptoms or the most likely and they need to be vigilant in helping track a child’s development. Close scrutiny will help determine how well they are progressing and ensuring they are not regressing in their skill development.

ASD
A child with ASD will develop symptoms before the age of 3. These symptoms can be detected as early as a few months of age, or not show up until 24 months or later. Some children develop normally until around 18 months and then stop gaining new skills, or they lose the skills they once had. Common symptoms are:

• Avoid eye contact and want to be alone
• Not respond to their name by 12 months of age
• Experience delayed speech and language skills
• Repeat words or phrases over and over (echolalia)
• Be extremely agitated by minor changes
• Have obsessive interests
• Flap their hands, rock their body or spin in circles
• Have unusual reactions to the way things sound, smell, taste, look or feel

There are three different types of ASD:

• Autistic Disorder: Significant language delays, social and communication challenges and unusual behaviors and interests. Some may have intellectual disability.
• Asperger Syndrome: Milder symptoms of autistic disorder. Typically do not have problems with language or intellectual disability.
• Pervasive Developmental Disorder (atypical autism): Usually have fewer and milder symptoms than those with typical autistic disorder. Symptoms might pose only social and communication challenges.

If you have concerns about possible delays in your child's developmental, contact your doctor in the first instance. If you are not satisfied with your doctor's response or if he confirms your suspicions, ask for a referral to a qualidied specialist. Someone that will be able to perform a more in-depth evaluation of your child.