The latest ADHD research

What are the new and innovative ways that scientists have found to help people with ADHD? Ellie Dommett is a professor of neuroscience at King's College London, where she leads the ADHD research lab…

Ellie - Certainly researchers are looking quite carefully at different types of exercise. We know from our own research that individuals with ADHD often end up exercising as a way that they recognise is self-managing their symptoms. So not necessarily on the guidance of a healthcare professional, sometimes it's before they've managed to get a diagnosis, so they really interact with healthcare professionals, but they're working out that exercise can help them manage life better and manage their symptoms better. So exercise is starting to show a reasonable amount of evidence for being beneficial and it's beneficial to everybody. So it's not just that you'll only attend more if you have ADHD once you've exercised. It appears that exercise is just generally good for lots of mental functions. Those with ADHD are no different. So exercise is helpful. Changes in diet have been looked at in various different ways. So there's no recommendation, for example, to do things like remove food colorings, which is an area that has received quite a lot of media coverage previously, or to cut out all sugar or anything like that. Actually, the evidence in this area is much weaker than it is for exercise. So by weaker evidence, I don't mean that we don't think diet is helpful or as helpful, but rather we don't yet have enough evidence to make a solid conclusion. The longest study that's looked at diet has examined something called the few foods diets. So that's where you sort of remove lots of food and then gradually reintroduce them and examine what happens to symptoms. And that's probably the one that's received the most attention, but it is also only showing very small effects. So whilst it could be beneficial, those effects are quite small. As well as looking at diet and exercise, there is research looking into things like mindfulness. Mindfulness has been very popular, not just for conditions like ADHD. It's very popular for just general wellbeing. So not because you feel that you need to remove symptoms of a condition like depression and anxiety, but rather just because it's a nice practice to get a better sense of wellbeing. And mindfulness studies into ADHD have seen some improvements. One of the challenges to all treatments for ADHD is that ADHD rarely occurs by itself. It's a condition that is often co-occurring, or comorbid to use the medical term, co-occurring with other conditions. And in adults it's particularly common, for example, to see ADHD alongside depression or anxiety or both of these. Now, mindfulness may be beneficial, but what we are not clear on yet is, is it beneficial to ADHD or does it reduce some of the symptoms of depression and anxiety? So the person feels better even though their ADHD symptoms have remained. So there's various lifestyle approaches that are being taken to look at how we could improve the experiences of somebody with ADHD. And then there's also behavioural-type treatments that are more novel and innovative. So ones that are not yet currently recommended, but people are looking at in research. So we're doing some work, for example, on eye movement training and whether that could be beneficial to individuals with ADHD. And we're particularly looking at adults. So there's a range of different approaches that are being investigated. And that's a really important thing because when a condition is as diverse as ADHD, you will not get a one size fits all solution.

Chris - How might the way you move your eyes affect your ADHD experience?

Ellie - So the hypothesis that we are working with, and it is very much still a hypothesis, which means we're trying to test this idea out. So we haven't got definitive proof. But our hypothesis relates to the fact that we produce tiny eye movements all the time. And these are ones that we're not even aware we're making. And when we make those eye movements, they're called microsaccades. They're very, very tiny. Those eye movements are controlled by a very small region in the middle of the brain called the superior colliculus. And the superior colliculus is responsible for controlling those eye movements and the movements correlate very strongly with symptoms of ADHD. And the superior colliculus itself has been implicated in the brain basis of ADHD in a range of studies. What's interesting and what offers the possibility of a treatment or intervention is that eye movements can be trained. So we know that by doing various tasks to control where we look with our eyes, we can alter the movements that we make. And in order to make that alteration, of course we're actually altering the brain activity in the area that controls the movements. So if we can control our eye movements by altering activity in that area and that area is also responsible for some of the symptoms of the ADHD, then that may in turn improve the symptoms. So this is a very experimental idea, but it just demonstrates this need to look outside of traditional medication treatments for ADHD and also recognises the fact that we still don't have a brilliant understanding of what's changing in the brain with ADHD. So we need to be constantly exploring possibilities.