Archive for March, 2009
March 31st, 2009 | 
Author: As a Santa Barbara Chiropractor with special training in chiropractic neurology, in the field of ADHD, I fould this new research interesting and am glad to be able to share it.
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“We think poor working memory is a characteristic present in many children and adults with ADHD,” said Schweitzer, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. The current study, published online in February in the journal Child Neuropsychology, supports the idea that what underlies impaired working memory is a problem in how consistently a child with ADHD can respond during a working memory task. The current study took a closer look at their performance using a relatively newer statistical analytical approach, to determine whether the children with ADHD were indeed faster, slower, or if perhaps another, more complicated process was occurring. The hypothesis was that children with ADHD were actually mostly responding at the same rate as healthy children, but with more frequent very slow responses than the control subjects. Buzy said that the children with ADHD had more frequent longer response times when compared with their typically developing peers, but the responses they did give were just as accurate. Previous studies compared only the range of reaction times and average reaction times for children with ADHD and controls. The researchers also showed that working memory variability correlated with ADHD symptoms as scored by parent surveys (using the Conners’ ADHD rating scale) prior to testing. The current results led another Schweitzer laboratory member, postdoctoral fellow Catherine Fassbender, to design a study looking at variability in response time during a working memory task in the brains of children with ADHD using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
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