Finally Focused by James Greenblatt M.D

Author:James Greenblatt, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2017-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Sugar and the ADHD Brain

Blood sugar (glucose) is the fuel that powers every cell in the body—but brain cells need the most. By weight, the brain is 2% of the body, but it uses 20% of the body’s available glucose.8 And when glucose metabolism in the brain isn’t working right—when neurons don’t get the glucose they need—the brain doesn’t work right, either. And ADHD may be the result. Let’s look at some of the evidence:

ADHD brains use less glucose. A team of scientists in the Child Psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a study on 75 adults, trying to find a biochemical cause for ADHD.9 Twenty-five who had been diagnosed with ADHD in childhood “continued to have considerable difficulty with both restlessness and inattentiveness as adults” and were currently the parent of a child diagnosed with hyperactivity. Fifty others didn’t have ADHD but were similar in age, IQ, income, and education.

For the study, the scientists first asked all the participants to perform an “auditory-attention task”—pressing a button to identify the lowest intensity tone among three tones, which were played repeatedly, in varying order. Next, they injected all the participants with radioactive glucose, which was tracked in the brain via a PET scan. Thirty-five minutes after the injection, they asked the participants to once again perform the auditory-attention task. The results: “Cerebral glucose metabolism” was 8.1% lower in the ADHD adults during the task. In other words, their brains used a lot less of the available glucose.

And when the researchers looked closely at 60 specific regions of the brain, they found glucose metabolism in people with ADHD was “significantly reduced” in 30 of the 60 regions. Those regions included the premotor cortex and the superior prefrontal cortex—the areas in the brain that control attention and distractibility, “motor activity” (how much or how little a person moves, including how physically restless they are), and impulsivity.

Lower levels of key neurotransmitters. In another study on glucose and ADHD, researchers in the Children’s Clinical Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine studied 28 children ages 7 to 14—17 with ADHD and 11 without.10 Early in the morning, they gave the children a “glucose tolerance test”—a dose of pure glucose. Over the next several hours, they repeatedly measured several behavioral and biochemical parameters, like attentiveness and blood sugar levels. They also measured blood levels of the hormone epinephrine (adrenalin) and the neurotransmitter norepinephrine (noradrenalin). Both tend to be low in ADHD, and low levels of epinephrine are linked to aggressive and even violent behavior.

The results: The researchers found that there was virtually no difference between the way children with ADHD and those without the disorder responded to glucose. Both metabolized it normally, with a rise in blood glucose followed by a decline. However, as hours passed and blood sugar dropped, the non-ADHD children continued to generate normal levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine—while the ADHD children had lower levels of both. Epinephrine was 50% lower, a huge variation. The results, said the

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