Can brain scans identify ADHD and help predict treatment response?

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Inside the adult ADHD brain (MIT News):

“About 11 per­cent of school-age chil­dren in the Unit­ed States have been diag­nosed with atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der (ADHD). While many of these chil­dren even­tu­al­ly “out­grow” the dis­or­der, some car­ry their dif­fi­cul­ties into adult­hood: About 10 mil­lion Amer­i­can adults are cur­rent­ly diag­nosed with ADHD…“The psy­chi­atric guide­lines for whether a person’s ADHD is per­sis­tent or remit­ted are based on lots of clin­i­cal stud­ies and impres­sions. This new study sug­gests that there is a real bio­log­i­cal bound­ary between those two sets of patients,” says MIT’s John Gabrieli…

In the new study, the MIT team showed for the first time that in adults who had been diag­nosed with ADHD as chil­dren but no longer have it, this nor­mal syn­chrony pat­tern is restored. “Their brains now look like those of peo­ple who nev­er had ADHD,” Mat­tfeld says.

“This find­ing is quite intrigu­ing,” says Fran­cis­co Xavier Castellanos…“If it can be con­firmed, this pat­tern could become a tar­get for poten­tial mod­i­fi­ca­tion to help patients learn to com­pen­sate for the dis­or­der with­out chang­ing their genet­ic makeup.”

“We’re pret­ty excit­ed about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that some brain mea­sure­ment would tell us which child or adult is most like­ly to ben­e­fit from a treatment.”

Study: Brain dif­fer­ences between per­sis­tent and remit­ted atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der (Brain).

• Sum­ma­ry: Pre­vi­ous rest­ing state stud­ies exam­in­ing the brain basis of atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der have not dis­tin­guished between patients who per­sist ver­sus those who remit from the diag­no­sis as adults. To char­ac­ter­ize the neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences and sim­i­lar­i­ties of per­sis­tence and remit­tance, we per­formed rest­ing state func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing in indi­vid­u­als who had been lon­gi­tu­di­nal­ly and uni­form­ly char­ac­ter­ized as hav­ing or not hav­ing atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der in child­hood and again in adult­hood (16 years after base­line assessment)…The neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal dis­so­ci­a­tion between the per­sis­tence and remit­tance of atten­tion deficit hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der may pro­vide a frame­work for the rela­tion between the clin­i­cal diag­no­sis, which indi­cates the need for treat­ment, and addi­tion­al deficits that are com­mon, such as exec­u­tive dysfunctions.

Relat­ed articles:

• ADHD Study: Reduc­ing the Need for High Med­ica­tion Dos­es with Behav­ior Therapy
• Cog­ni­tive ther­a­py or med­ica­tion? Brain scans may help per­son­al­ize treatments