The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association - and it the manual used to diagnose psychiatric disorders - including ADD and ADHD.
The DSM criteria used to diagnose ADHD were developed with children as the focus. The criteria have been criticized in how poorly they help in the assessment and diagnosis of adult ADHD (or ADD).

Here is an article from the American Journal of Psychiatry which documents this issue in depth.

This article begins by summarizing the history of the diagnosis of ADHD.
It then criticizes the limitations of the diagnostic criteria for adults with ADHD.
One of the examples cited is the age of onset criteria - i.e. having to have symptoms before the age of 7 is often limiting. It is problematic, because it is often hard to establish this early history in an older adult. New research is showing that the age of onset is also too restrictive (this paper cites two new research papers which challenge this criterion).
Another criticism is that the description of impairment is done from the perspective of childhood ADHD and is not appropriate for the impairment that adults with ADHD experience.
Furthermore, the diagnostic threshold (i.e. 6 out of 9 symptoms) doesn’t reflect several lines of research which document that adults with fewer symptoms are still quite impaired from their ADHD.

The DSM-V is due out in 2011. Many researchers are working to improve the DSM criteria for adult ADD/ADHD. This is particulary needed because many doctors are not comfortable with the diagnosis of adult ADHD, and they need to have diagnostic criteria which will help them to diagnose this condition more easily. Also, new research has shown that 4.4% of american adults have ADD/ADHD. So there is a lot of need out there, and ‘new and improved’ DSM criteria are needed.

Please share your thoughts and comments below.

Dr. Kenny

Technorati Tags: Adult ADD, Adult ADHD, DSM, Diagnosis

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Although this blog is all about ADD and ADHD, as a blogger, there are issues and trends that I occasionally feel that I need to report on. If you are a blogger - this post is important to you.

Podcast and new media expert Paul Colligan recently had his content stolen and posted on Myspace news. This story was detailed on Techcrunch.

How can Myspace justify taking other people’s content?

And how can Google justify indexing Myspace’s plagiarism in their search results?

I find this to be a disturbing trend… That two of the web’s biggest sites would be collaborating to take your (or my) blog content. That just doesn’t seem right.

What do you think?

Dr. Kenny

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This is an article for the bloggers out there…

I have just come across a new service - being release today - that can help you to get a lot more traffic to your blog. It is called ‘Blog Rush‘.

Do you see the box on the right of this blog that says: ‘From The Blogosphere’? That is from Blog Rush.

Blog Rush serves up content from other related blogs (in my case, health and medicine blogs), and every time a visitor visits my blog and it loads, I get a ’syndication credit’, and a title of one of my blog posts is shown on someone else’s blog.

Then, if someone decides to add Blog Rush to their blog underneath you, you will get credit for their page views as well.

What this will do is allow you to syndicate your blog to many more people.

The earlier you join, the more traffic you’ll get.

Visit Blog Rush to learn more.

Dr. Kenny

p.s. We’ll return to ADHD content in the next post. As a blogger - I get really excited when something so cool comes out - I wanted to share it!

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A new research study was just released which tested light therapy on adults with ADHD. It was done at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and is the first study to examine light therapy as an add on treatment for adult ADHD.

Light therapy involves using a bright light, developed for medical use. It is a full-spectrum fluorescent light box that filters out
ultraviolet wavelengths. In this study, the participants used the bright light for 30 minutes each morning.

Why even consider light therapy for adult ADHD?

Light therapy is a proven treatment for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). SAD refers to individuals who have seasonal depression - generally in the fall and winter when the days are shorter and they are exposed to less sunlight.

While adults with ADHD tend to have higher rates of depression, many of them also have a delayed sleep/activity rhythm. This study looked at whether light therapy could help with their depression symptoms and even their ADHD symptoms.

This study showed that in ADHD adults treated with light therapy:

• 55% had less depression symptoms
• approximately 28% of had a full or partial improvement in
  attention deficit symptoms, measured with both questionnaires and actual
  laboratory-based tasks

Which ADHD symptoms improved?

The light therapy helped these core symptoms of ADHD:

• inattention
• difficulty sustaining effort
• impulsive responding to stimuli
• hypo-arousal/fatigue

Strikingly, the strongest predictor of improvement in ADHD symptoms from light therapy came from a change in circadian activity rhythms rather than decreasing
the symptoms of SAD that are often experienced by adults with ADHD.

Does this mean that if you have adult ADHD that you should start light therapy this fall or winter?
Not necessarily. While this is a promising and fascinating study, more research is needed.

This study does suggest that if you have seasonal depression with adult ADHD, you may be the perfect candidate for light therapy this winter. Talk to your doctor and review your options.

To read more details of the study, visit here.

Consider printing this article and taking it with you to the doctor to discuss.

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