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Okay so now an MRI brain scan will be par-for-the-course for children thought to be experiencing ADHD symptoms in advance of prescribing medication, right? Seem

Okay so now an MRI brain scan will be par-for-the-course for children thought to be experiencing ADHD symptoms in advance of prescribing medication, right? Seems reasonable. Otherwise how else can one objectively note whether an ADHD "brain issue" is at fault or, uh, simple emotional adaptive recalcitrance?

agentgt 10y ago
I'm fairly certain most experts can tell the difference and not all experts are for prescribing medicine either (I believe John Ratey is fairly against it). Being disobedient does not mean ADHD (and of course the inverse) and there different expressions of ADHD as well (like the passive wondering mind version of which I have). Unfortunately the mass public (and apparently you as well based on your comment) associate hyperactive disobedient behavior with ADHD.
deleted 10y ago
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wyldfire 10y ago
That's pretty unlikely IMO. Physicians are remarkably pragmatic. Diagnostic imaging tools like CT and MRI were created in order to avoid the risk of exploratory surgery. As a byproduct, they are also useful in medical research applications like these. From the article: > “We hope that this will help to reduce stigma that ADHD is ‘just a label’ for difficult children or caused by poor parenting." In general, diagnostic imaging is funded to mitigate some other downstream risk. "Would the wrong treatment be harmful?" [not in this case, popular treatment is pharmeceutical - psychostimulants, pretty safe drugs]. "Would delaying diagnosis of a non-ADHD disease be harmful?" [not likely given the symptoms]. If you had an extraordinary case ("Patient is allergic to psychostimulants and alternative treatment X is expensive or risky"), this research might be used to convince the relevant parties that an MRI to rule-out ADHD is worthwhile.
indolering 10y ago
AFAIK, fMRI scans are rarely of diagnostic utility in psychiatric disorders due to individual variances. Seriously, where you process parts of speech floats around in different places. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is like taking a heat map of a CPU, they have become high resolution but you can only figure out what functional components of the CPU have been active after a circuit has been running for a very long time. Then you have the arduous task of reverse engineering the algorithm running on that wetware. Now throw in a bunch of variables such as age.... Things might have changed, but we are still a long way out.

agentgt 10y ago

I'm fairly certain most experts can tell the difference and not all experts are for prescribing medicine either (I believe John Ratey is fairly against it). Being disobedient does not mean ADHD (and of course the inverse) and there different expressions of ADHD as well (like the passive wondering mind version of which I have). Unfortunately the mass public (and apparently you as well based on your comment) associate hyperactive disobedient behavior with ADHD.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wyldfire 10y ago

That's pretty unlikely IMO. Physicians are remarkably pragmatic. Diagnostic imaging tools like CT and MRI were created in order to avoid the risk of exploratory surgery. As a byproduct, they are also useful in medical research applications like these. From the article: > “We hope that this will help to reduce stigma that ADHD is ‘just a label’ for difficult children or caused by poor parenting." In general, diagnostic imaging is funded to mitigate some other downstream risk. "Would the wrong treatment be harmful?" [not in this case, popular treatment is pharmeceutical - psychostimulants, pretty safe drugs]. "Would delaying diagnosis of a non-ADHD disease be harmful?" [not likely given the symptoms]. If you had an extraordinary case ("Patient is allergic to psychostimulants and alternative treatment X is expensive or risky"), this research might be used to convince the relevant parties that an MRI to rule-out ADHD is worthwhile.

indolering 10y ago

AFAIK, fMRI scans are rarely of diagnostic utility in psychiatric disorders due to individual variances. Seriously, where you process parts of speech floats around in different places. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is like taking a heat map of a CPU, they have become high resolution but you can only figure out what functional components of the CPU have been active after a circuit has been running for a very long time. Then you have the arduous task of reverse engineering the algorithm running on that wetware. Now throw in a bunch of variables such as age.... Things might have changed, but we are still a long way out.