Adhd And What Causes The Childhood Behavioral Condition

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is a behavioral disorder that is mostly found in children. According to one research almost 7.5 percent of school-aged children are suffering from some kind of ADHD related behavioral problem in the United States. In some cases, untreated symptoms can persist in the adulthood too, which can create numerous problems in the patient's social and emotional life. ADHD is rarely found in isolation as the child may also develop some other behavioral problems. The existence of more than one behavioral disorder is known as co-morbidity, which usually complicates the case because the child cannot be treated for one specific condition. It was once believed that ADHD patients outgrow the symptoms with age but this theory is no longer supported by latest research, which indicates that without treatment, ADHD's symptoms can easily persist in one's adult life.

Therefore parents are required to seek treatment, which may involve medical and non-medical procedures as soon as the child is diagnosed with ADHD. Adults suffering from ADHD do not develop this problem suddenly and thus it is believed that symptoms existed in the childhood too which only aggravated with time because of lack of proper treatment. Most experts are of the view that ADHD is essentially a childhood condition and symptoms starting appearing at an early age.

Claudia Wallis writes, "Fifteen years ago, no one had ever heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Today it is the most common behavioral disorder in American children, the subject of thousands of studies and symposiums and no small degree of controversy. Experts on ADHD say it afflicts as many as 3 1/2 million American youngsters, or up to 5% of those under 18. It is two to three times as likely to be diagnosed in boys as in girls. The disorder has replaced what used to be popularly called "hyperactivity," and it includes a broader collection of symptoms. ADHD has three main hallmarks: extreme distractibility, an almost reckless impulsiveness and, in some but not all cases, a knee-jiggling, toe-tapping hyperactivity that makes sitting still all but impossible. (Without hyperactivity, the disorder is called attention deficit disorder, or ADD)" (Wallis 1994).

While the debate about this disorder and its gravity continues, researchers have been unable to find an answer to the most commonly asked question. What causes ADHD? If only we had a perfect answer to this important question, we could have found a successful way to treat this disorder and abolish its symptoms. But since there are more than one theory and view on this particular question as researchers have come up with only tentative answers, which still require solid evidence and further research. Every new research presents findings, which usually invalidate previous studies. In this paper, we shall thus focus on the causes and find out if the disorder is a genetic problem or simply a personality type.

The causes of ADHD, as indicated by various researches, include everything from flawed fetal development to poor parenting to defective genes but no one is certain what really makes a child or adult behave in an abnormal manner (Bussing 2000). While an accurate answer to the question of causes is being actively sought, it has proved t be highly elusive in nature. The problem of ADHD is however not very new. Its origin can be traced back to early 1900s when a scientist recognized a group of children who would indulge in involuntary behavior. But since causes were unknown as they still are, the scientist assumed that these children were mentally deranged and concluded something was probably wrong with their brain size. Some scientists even blamed brain injuries for sudden occurrence of ADHD symptoms but it has been found that only ten percent of cases are connected with brain injury while the rest cannot be disposed off so easily. Regina Bussing M.D. writes, "While birth injuries and maternal alcohol or tobacco use may be factors in some cases of ADHD, most experts agree those factors account for less than 10 percent of cases" (Bussing 2002). In order to leave no stone unturned and no theory unexplored, some scientists are even researching the brain size theory but most have narrowed down the long list of causes to genetics and abnormal brain development. It is not clear if these causes have any relation but these assumptions contain more substance than several other theories. Abnormal brain development is a complex subject, which requires extensive research as does the genetics theory. Many scientists even maintain that it is due to imperfect genes that some portions of brain fail to develop properly.

Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, in her article on the subject of brain development and its connection with ADHD, writes "Given the complexity of the brain's attention and thinking mechanisms, the prevalence of the disorder is not surprising. "There is so much complicated communication in the brain, with different parts talking to each other," says Timothy Wilens, a staff psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, "that it is not easy to get unification." For example, many studies suggest that the reduced frontal-lobe activity in ADHD may be caused in turn by decreased activity in the basal ganglia, a deeper part of the forebrain that generates two important neurotransmitters called dopamine and norepinephrine. Studies suggest that abnormally low supplies of these chemicals may be involved in inattention. Indeed, the theory behind stimulant medications is that they adhere to and activate these illusive neurotransmitters and, through a cascade of neuronal events, "light up" the prefrontal cortex" (Szegedy-Maszak 2002).

All this may appear a little too complex but it certainly is not without grains of truth. Scientists agree that each part of human brain is responsible for a different function therefore even slight abnormality in one can trigger a series of problems. Keeping this information in view, we can safely say that damage or abnormal development of the area responsible for attention and concentration may cause a person to indulge in irregular behavior. The field of genetics is being actively explored to find out causes of several mental and behavioral disorders including depression, oppositional defiant disorder, and schizophrenia. There is a bright chance that with this exploration, we might get some solid answers, which would remove the mystery surrounding ADHD and other related conditions. To determine the exact variant of genes may not be an easy task but some names started already making an appearance on the list.

Arthur Allen sheds more light on this, "The leading candidate gene for ADHD is a variant of the gene known as DRD4. This variant apparently causes a receptor on certain brain cells to have trouble