These are the world’s most high ranking experts on ADHD

Posted on by Jeanette Mostert

Who are the most knowledgeable people about ADHD in the world? According to the website expertscape.com, these are professors Stephen Faraone (SUNY upstate University), Samuel Cortese (University of Southampton) and Jan Buitelaar (Radboud University Nijmegen).

What’s more, several scientists who are involved in our research consortia that investigate ADHD (i.e. Aggressotype, CoCA, IMpACT, Eat2beNICE) are top-ranked in this list of more than 30.000 possible experts in the field. These include Stephen Faraone, Jan Buitelaar, Philip Asherson, Barbara Franke, Joseph Antoni Ramos-Quiroga, Henrik Larsson, Catharina Hartman and Pieter Hoekstra. What this means is that the ADHD research that we do, and that is often reported on in this blog, is lead by the world’s top ADHD experts.

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‘Our’ top-ranked ADHD experts. From left-to-right: Stephen Faraone, Jan Buitelaar, Philip Asheron, Barbara Franke, Joseph Antoni Ramos-Quiroga, Henrik Larsson, Catharina Hartman, Pieter Hoekstra.

How is an expert defined?

The website expertscape was started by John Sotos when he was looking for an expert on Parkinson’s disease to treat his uncle. This turned out to be more difficult than he thought. As John Sotos was a doctor himself, he luckily had a large network of doctors that he could contact about this. But this made him realise that people who don’t have such a network, would not be able to find out who the most knowledgeable persons are on a particular topic. He therefore created this website expertscape.com

The way the website works is quite simple: it searches for academic, peer-reviewed publications by a certain person on a certain topic. The more someone has published on a topic, the higher this person is ranked. Thus,  “[a]n expert is not just someone who knows a lot about a particular topic. We additionally require that the expert write about the topic, and be involved at the leading edge of investigation of the topic.”

This means that the site is actually not a very good tool to find a good doctor. As the website acknowledges “a great doctor has many important qualities beyond expert knowledge of your very specific medical condition.” However, it does mean that the website is pretty good at providing a simple overview of who has a lot of scientific knowledge about a specific topic.

So are they really experts?

In the past years I have met with most people in the top of this list, and I dare say that they are very knowledgeable indeed. Each of them has been working in the ADHD field for a considerable amount of time and has added important new insights into ADHD through research and publications. What I find most striking from this list however, is that most of these experts work together in consortia and international networks. And that is how the field really moves forward: by combining the knowledge of all these experts.

Several of these experts have also written for this blog:

 

Source: http://expertscape.com/ex/attention+deficit+disorder+with+hyperactivity

 

This blog was written by Jeanette Mostert. Jeanette studied brain connectivity in adult ADHD during her PhD. She is now dissemination manager of the international consortia CoCA and Eat2beNICE. 

 

Light therapy and its influence on ADHD: An interview

Posted on by lisahpbos

 

Nina (27 years, Dutch) participated in the PROUD-study and followed our light therapy. In this interview she describes the influences light therapy had on her ADHD symptoms.

What is it like to live with ADHD?

Please describe your main symptoms.

The symptom I experience as the most troublesome is making new friends. It is harder for me to make new friends, knowing I have fewer emotional and cognitive skills than peers. I am more sensitive to persons and situations and I experience them as more severe.

Besides, it is harder for me to see things in perspective and my perspectives change a lot over short periods of time. This makes it harder to look further in the future when making decisions. I also have less patience and it is harder for me to concentrate on a task. 

How does ADHD influence your life?

As I explained in the question before it can be tough to make friends. Concerning work, my ADHD has positive and negative effects. The negative effects are my lack of concentration, sometimes a job has to be done at a certain moment when I have no concentration, which can be a real struggle. The positive side is that I am creative and my spatial development is good. These are qualities that come handy at my job. Also my intelligence helps me. Because I am smart I can work fast at the moments my concentration is good, in order to compensate for the moments where my concentration is lost.

Do you think ADHD has any positive influences in your life?

It sure has, but these influences often last for a short period of time. I can be really enthusiastic and I am good at identifying people. This quality makes me a really good friend. Also my creativity is a positive effect of ADHD.

How have you been treated (medication/ psychotherapy)? What are the effects?

For a year and a half I have lived internally in a group especially for adolescents with ADHD and/or autism. Here I followed a training to improve my social abilities, how to engage in relationships with others and to be more independent.

From my 16th I take medication. I have switched a lot and tried different kinds of medication. Much of them did not work well for me, I even tried anti-depressants which made me feel sad. I am currently taking Stratera (short acting) and this works well for me. I don’t take it regularly but only at moments where I think I need it.

Study and intervention

How did you learn about the study?

I am regularly searching the internet to learn more about ADHD. This time I was searching information about comorbidity and neurodiversity and this is how I found your website, by chance.

What motivated you to participate?

It is a good thing that more research is done and I find it important to contribute. The more research is being conducted, the better others with ADHD can be helped. It is of great importance of me to be able to be a part in this. As long as we do not contribute to this kind of research, nothing will chance.

What were your expectations about the study before you started?

To be honest I did not have any expectations because I did not want to be affected by them.

What intervention did you participate in? When?

I participated in the bright light therapy from the 18th of October (2018) until the 10th of January (2019).

What did you like about the intervention? What did you dislike about the intervention?

At the beginning it was kind of hard, I found it really hard to be sitting still half an hour in the morning. Normally I rush through the mornings and do not really sit still at all. My solution was to put the lamp at my nightstand and sit in bed for half an hour in the morning, waking up next to the lamp. You can adjust the brightness of the lamp so I started with dimmed light and increased brightness step by step. Important is to sit upright because otherwise there is a chance of falling back to sleep!

In the beginning I had not realized what an impact this therapy has on your daily life, you really need the motivation to sit through, every day. After some time I got adapted to a new rhythm which made it easier to follow the light therapy for 6 times week. Only on Saturdays I skipped the sessions because of the weekend.

Was the intervention helpful?

It definitely has positive influences. The biggest change I have experienced is the adaptation to a more natural day/night rhythm. I was hoping a side effect would be falling asleep faster but unfortunately this was not the case for me.

The first days I experienced some negative side effects, which are explained in the bright light manual. Maybe it would be better if I had not read the manual because I was so focused on the experience of these side effects. What I felt was a really grumpy mood in the mornings. Luckily it only lasted for a few days.

Are you planning on continuing the intervention?

No, I have no plans of buying a lamp myself. Looking back at the intervention I think I would benefit more by participating in the aerobic exercise intervention, because sitting still for half an hour without a clear purpose is tough. Of course I did adapt to a better and more natural day/night rhythm because of the bright light therapy, but I think this could also be accomplished by going to bed at the same time every day.

Was it difficult/easy to use the App?

Definitely not difficult. The researches informed me about the sensor and how it might be inconvenient in the beginning but I only had to get used to it during the nights. The app was really clear and straight-forward, easy to use. I did forget the phone a few times, making me drive back home, but if you wear pants with pockets this should not be a problem.

Would you recommend other people with ADHD to participate in the study? Why?

I would definitely recommend it to people who are interested in this study and are motivated to participate. You really have to do it because you want it, not only because you want to help others.

Any suggestions/ways that the researchers could improve the experience for people in this study?

In my experience the study is set up well. Sometimes something went wrong (system was not installed right so they had to send me a new set, this set came without a wristband, red.) but the researchers handled it well and professionally. The researchers were cooperative and I liked participating in this study.

Lisa Bos, MSC works at Karakter Child and Youth Psychiatry and Radboud UMC (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) where she works as a researcher for the TRACE project and the PROUD-study. Both studies focus on additional treatments for ADHD and a healthy lifestyle which are also her main interests. She finds importance in studying socially relevant topics and improving the quality of care for ADHD patients.

The cortex and ADHD: the second project of the ENIGMA-ADHD collaboration.

Posted on by Martinehoogman

After the first project on subcortical brain volumes in ADHD, published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2017 , ENIGMA-ADHD now analysed cortical data of 2246 people with a diagnosis of ADHD and 1713 people without, aged between four and 63 years old.  The data came from 37 research groups from around the world. FreeSurfer (imaging software) parcellations of thickness and surface area of 34 cortical regions were compared between cases and controls in 3 separate age groups; children, adolescents and adults.

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Subtle differences only in the group of children were found. The childhood effects were most prominent and widespread for the surface area of the cortex. More focal changes were found for thickness of the cortex. All differences were subtle and detected only at a group level, and thus these brain images cannot be used to diagnose ADHD or guide its treatment.

These subtle differences in the brain’s cortex were not limited to people with the clinical diagnosis of ADHD: they were also present – in a less marked form – in youth with some ADHD symptoms. This second finding results from a collaboration between the ENIGMA-ADHD Working Group and the Generation-R study from Rotterdam, which has brain images on 2700 children aged 9-11 years from the general population. The researchers found more symptoms of inattention to be associated with a decrease in cortical surface area. In a third study, using the NeuroImage data from Nijmegen and Amsterdam, familial effects on those regions that showed case-control differences were investigated.  Siblings of those with ADHD showed changes to their cortical surface area that resembled their affected sibling. This suggests that familial factors such as genetics or shared environment may play a role in brain cortical characteristics.

‘We identified cortical differences that are consistently associated with ADHD combining data from many different research groups internationally. We find that the differences extend beyond narrowly-defined clinical diagnoses and are seen, in a less marked manner, in those with some ADHD symptoms and in unaffected siblings of people with ADHD. This finding supports the idea that the symptoms underlying ADHD may be a continuous trait in the population, which has already been reported by other behavioural and genetic studies.’ In the future, the ADHD Working Group, which is led by Martine Hoogman and Barbara Franke from the Radboudumc in Nijmegen, hopes to look at additional key features in the brain- such as the structural connections between brain areas – and to increase the representation of adults affected by ADHD, in whom limited research has been performed to date.

Link to the article: Hoogman et al., Brain Imaging of the Cortex in ADHD: A Coordinated Analysis of Large-Scale Clinical and Population-Based Samples

To learn more about other projects that are carried out using ENIGMA-ADHD data, please also read the paper by Yanli Zhang-James and colleagues on bioRxiv. Here, the ENIGMA-ADHD data of the first and the second project were used to do prediction modelling.  

The ADHD Working Group is one of over 50 working groups of the ENIGMA Consortium, in which international researchers pull together to understand the brain alterations associated with different disorders and the role of genetic and environmental factors in those alterations. For more information about ENIGMA-ADHD please visit our website http://enigma.usc.edu/ongoing/enigma-adhd-working-group/ or contact Martine Hoogman martine.hoogman (at) radboudumc.nlenigma_300dpi

Who is the average patient with ADHD?

Posted on by thomaswolfers

Is there an ‘average ADHD brain’? Our research group (from the Radboudumc in Nijmegen) shows that the average patient with ADHD does not exist biologically. These findings were recently published in the journal. Psychological Medicine.

Most biological psychiatry research heavily relies on so-called case-control comparisons. In this approach a group of patients with for instance ADHD is compared against a group of healthy individuals on a number of biological variables. If significant group effects are observed those are related to for instance the diagnosis ADHD. This often results in statements such as individuals with ADHD show differences in certain brain structures. While our results are in line with those earlier detected group effects, we clearly show that a simple comparison of these effects disguises individual differences between patients with the same mental disorder.

Modelling individual brains

In order to show this, we developed a technique called ‘normative modelling’ which allows us to map the brain of each individual patient against typical development. In this way we can see that individual differences in brain structure across individuals with ADHD are far greater than previously anticipated. In future, we hope that this approach provides important insights and sound evidence for an individualized approach to mental healthcare for ADHD and other mental disorders.

Individual differences in ADHD

When we studied the brain scans of individual patients, the differences between those were substantial. Only a few identical abnormalities in the brain occurred in more than two percent of patients. Marquand: “The brains of individuals with ADHD deviate so much from the average that the average has little to say about what might be occurring in the brain of an individual.”

Personalized diagnosis of ADHD

The research shows that almost every patient with ADHD has her or his own biological profile. The current method of making a diagnosis of psychiatric disorders based on symptoms is therefore not sufficient, the authors say: “Variation between patients is reflected in the brain, but despite this enormous variation all these people get the same diagnosis. Thus, we cannot achieve a better understanding of the biology behind ADHD by studying the average patient. We need to understand for each individual what the causes of a disorder may be. Insights based on research at group level say little about the individual patient.”

Re-conceptualize mental disorders

The researchers want to make a fingerprint of individual brains on the basis of differences in relation to the healthy range. Wolfers: “Psychiatrists and psychologists know very well that each patient is an individual with her or his own tale, history and biology. Nevertheless, we use diagnostic models that largely ignore these differences. Here, we raise this issue by showing that the average patient has limited informative value and by including biological, symptomatic and demographic information into our models. In future we hope that this kinds of models will help us to re-conceptualize mental disorders such as ADHD.”

Further reading

Wolfers, T., Beckmann, C.F., Hoogman, M., Buitelaar, J.K., Franke, B., Marquand, A.F. (2019). Individual differences v. the average patient: mapping the heterogeneity in ADHD using normative models. Psychological Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000084 .

This blog was written by Thomas Wolfers and Andre Marquand from the Radboudumc and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. On 15 March 2019 Thomas Wolfers will defend his doctoral thesis entitled ‘Towards precision medicine in psychiatry’ at the Radboud university in Nijmegen. You can find his thesis at http://www.thomaswolfers.com

MindChamp: Mindfulness for Children with ADHD and Mindful Parenting

Posted on by Corina Greven

Mindfulness for children with ADHD and their parents. Is that an alternative to medicine? Misha Beliën talks to Corina Greven about this question. She is project leader of MindChamp, an innovative study into the effectiveness of mindfulness as an addition to care-as-usual for ADHD.

Video originally posted on: http://www.bodhitv.nl