adult ADD

Ever find yourself chatting via instant messaging while checking your e-mail and surfing the Web? Well, don’t pat yourself on the back for your super-productive behavior.

Expert: “The findings suggest there may be a cost associated with becoming an expert multitasker.”

A new study suggests that people who often do multiple tasks in a variety of media — texting, instant messaging, online video watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more — do worse on tests in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who rarely multitask in this way.

Specifically, heavy multitaskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant information than those who aren’t constantly in a multimedia frenzy, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One reason may be because the multitaskers tend to retain the distracting information in their short-term memory, which affects their ability to focus, compared with people who don’t check their e-mail while talking on the phone and sneaking in some online shopping. Health.com: The best memory boosters for women

“This study adds to a growing body of literature that says, in general, that multitasking is going to be problematic for people, that it does compromise productivity, and that its consequences can be quite severe in situations like driving,” says David W. Goodman, M.D., the director of the Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Center of Maryland, in Baltimore, who was not involved in the research.

In the study, Clifford Nass, Ph.D., and colleagues at Stanford University gave 262 college students a questionnaire about what types of media they used and how often they used them simultaneously. Examples included video or computer games; online audio, video, or television; telephone and cell phones; instant and text messaging; and other computer-based applications, such as word processing.

The volunteers then took a series of tests in which they had to categorize words, evaluate on-screen red triangles (while ignoring blue ones), switch back and forth between classifying letters and numbers, or press a button when there was a match between two letters presented at different times. Health.com: How to get your way with body language

After jumping through the mental hoops, the researchers found that the heavy multimedia users were at a disadvantage. Compared with those who rarely used more than one type of media at a time, heavy multitaskers had slower response times, most often because they were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and because they retained that useless information in their short-term memory.

While the delay was only about half a second in some tests, this could be enough to cause problems in everyday life, says Goodman, who is also an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Health.com: Celebrities with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

“You’re being flooded with too much information and you can’t selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important,” says Goodman. “It only takes a fraction of a second for you to take your eyes off the road and miss the guy making a right-hand turn into your lane.”

Gary Aston-Jones, Ph.D., the Murray chair of excellence in neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina, says the findings suggest there may be a cost associated with becoming an expert multitasker.

Multitasking may “lower the threshold of distractibility,” possibly harming the ability to do tasks that require intense sustained focus, such as art, science, and writing, he says. Health.com: Slideshow: The cure for Blackberry thumb and other tech aches

“There are some possibly frightening implications of the study. If it’s not very reversible, then the way the culture has become might be pushing us all to become more and more distractible and less and less able to focus over sustained periods of time,” he says. “But I think it is a little early to jump to that conclusion — we don’t yet know how reversible and flexible these things might be.”

Aston-Jones says that it’s unclear if some people are drawn to multitasking because that’s the way their brain works, or if multitasking itself causes changes in the brain. And it’s not clear if the brain changes caused by switching attention from YouTube to Google toTwitter and then back to your iPhone — if that is what is occurring — are easily reversed.

Dr. Goodman offers the advice he gives to many of his patients with adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, who often have difficulty focusing and completing tasks.

He suggests turning off your BlackBerry so that it doesn’t vibrate every time you get a text or an e-mail. “Put the e-mails on your schedule and don’t be a slave to the BlackBerry buzzer,” he says. “I check my e-mails once an hour, once every two hours — I’m not responding to them as they come in.” Health.com: Yoga eases hot flashes and boosts memory

However, he says that multitasking won’t give you ADHD, which is a highly genetic condition. “You can’t cause ADHD,” he says. “You don’t wake up at 7 years old or 24 years old and because you played too many video games you have ADHD.”

Aston-Jones says to stay tuned for more research. “There hasn’t been a huge amount of work in this area up to this point,” he says. “It’s an area that’s really starting and will be increasing.”

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TUESDAY, May 26 (HealthDay News) — Children with attention problems in kindergarten often struggle academically right through high school, a new study suggests.

The study, led by Joshua Breslau of the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, is among the first to show how attention problems early in a child’s life can shape and predict future academic performance, he said.

“The evidence suggests what many educators may already suspect, that kids with attention problems don’t learn as much,” said Breslau, an anthropologist and epidemiologist. “This starts very early for many children and is cumulative.”

The study used data collected by Breslau’s mother, Naomi Breslau, an epidemiologist at Michigan State University, for research she had conducted in the 1980s and ’90s. In that study, researchers followed more than 800 children from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds in the Detroit area, examining the impact of low birth weight on psychological development.

The UC Davis researchers used information collected on 693 of these children, from ages 6 through 17. They zeroed in on three types of behaviors as scored by their teachers — “internalizing” behaviors such as anxiety and depression; “externalizing” behaviors such as acting out and breaking rules; and attention problems such as restlessness and the inability to focus on one activity.

Compared with other childhood psychiatric problems, including depression, anxiety and disruptive behavior, Breslau and his team found that attention problems — including symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — had the strongest impact on a child’s future academic success. Signs of ADHD often begin showing up in kindergarten, a child’s first school experience that demands a higher level of learning and cognitive skills.

“Ultimately, students who do poorly may lose motivation to invest in academic work, become more open to competing interests, including substance abuse, and more likely to drop out of school,” the study authors wrote in the article, published in the June issue of Pediatrics.

As a child progresses through school, the level of failure from ADHD can snowball and lead to emotional problems, substance abuse and academic decline in later grades and difficulties after graduation, said Dr. David W. Goodman, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and director of the Adult Attention-Deficit Disorder Center of Maryland.

“For kids, it’s about academic achievement. But later in life, it’s about ADHD’s impact on family, occupation and social life,” he said.

The study stopped short of making specific recommendations, but suggested that school officials need to focus more resources on identifying and helping young children who are struggling with attention problems.

According to Julie Schweitzer, a study author and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the UC Davis School of Medicine, parents and teachers of young children need to be on lookout for signs of unusual attention problems. While it’s normal for 5- and 6-year-olds to be active, those with real attention problems may have unusual difficulty following directions, completing simple projects and controlling impulses, she said.

Treatment at that age usually entails parent training and classroom-based interventions, said Schweitzer, adding that ADHD is a chronic condition for many people and may require years of symptom management, though a percentage of children do outgrow it.

More research is needed to determine how best to help children with ADHD and attention difficulties, said Breslau, who is planning to study the exact relationship between severe attention problems and substance abuse and dropout rates.

“ADHD is underreported and under-appreciated as a source of long-term academic failure,” Breslau said. “Studies clearly show that early investment in children pays off big later on.”

More information

There’s more on ADHD at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

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Children with eczema are more likely to also have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than those without the skin problem, according to a study.

About 20 percent of children in Western nations have atopic eczema by age 6.

The children in the study had atopic eczema, a scaly, itchy skin rash that is typically caused by allergies and is common among infants. The rash often improves as a child gets older, although it does signal an increased likelihood that he or she will go on to develop allergies, hay fever, or asthma. Health.com: What eczema and other rashes look like

German researchers spotted the link in a study of 1,436 children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 who had atopic eczema and 1,436 young people without it. They found that 5.2 percent of eczema patients had ADHD, compared with 3.4 percent of eczema-free youngsters, according to a research letter in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Young people with atopic eczema were 54 percent more likely to have an ADHD diagnosis than those without it. And the more frequently they had visited a doctor for eczema, the more likely they were to have attention problems, say study coauthors Jochen Schmitt, M.D., a dermatologist at Technische Universität in Dresden, and Marcel Romanos, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Hospital Clinic of the University of Wuerzberg, both in Germany.

About 20 percent of children in Western nations are found to have atopic eczema by age 6. About a third of those children go on to have hay fever or asthma. Health.com: How to allergy-proof your house

“Atopic eczema is highly prevalent in children and it is known to gravely affect the quality of life,” Schmitt and Romanos wrote in an email. “Therefore the assumption that it might be related to or influence the presence of psychiatric problems is not far-fetched.”

However, the link needs to be confirmed by additional research, they said. It’s possible that eczema-related itching or sleep disturbances may exacerbate ADHD symptoms in some children, the researchers suggested. It’s also possible that atopic eczema and ADHD could share an underlying cause.

“It is important to note, however, that this finding might only be relevant for some and not all children with ADHD,” the researchers said.

Special diets (for example, regimens that eliminate food additives and sugar) have been proposed for treating ADHD, but the role of diet and food sensitivity in the condition has been highly controversial. No high-quality studies have been able to show that changing a child’s diet has any impact on ADHD symptoms, notes David W. Goodman, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Some research has linked ADHD to allergic conditions such as hay fever, added Goodman, who directs the Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Center of Maryland in Lutherville, but “the research is in no way conclusive or definitive.” Health.com: Celebrities with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

“The report adds additional circumstantial evidence to our hypothesis” that immune-system factors are involved in ADHD, according to Jan Buitelaar, M.D., Ph.D., of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in Nigmegen, The Netherlands. Buitelaar was not involved in the current study but coauthored a 2008 paper suggesting that ADHD may be an allergic condition in some patients.

“There is data that allergic mechanisms could alter brain neurotransmission and brain functioning,” Buitelaar noted via email. He also pointed out that children could develop “disruptive and restless behavior” as a result of the itchiness and pain caused by the skin condition.

While the current findings are “an interesting scientific pursuit,” Goodman says, he says they’re not that useful in caring for patients. “As yet, it’s not ready for prime time clinical practice and runs the risk of delaying otherwise proven effective treatment.”

Goodman said he has nothing against complementary or alternative approaches, as long as they don’t supplant medication and behavioral therapy, which are known to work. Unfortunately, he added, companies that make “nutraceuticals” often take preliminary research and “run with it from a marketing perspective.”

He added, “Ultimately, treatment is a combination of medication for ADHD and environmental changes that promote behavioral changes.” Health.com: 6 Skin-healthy vacations: Could a getaway solve your problems?

Goodman noted that two out of five studies have found some evidence that omega-3 fatty acids may benefit ADHD patients. “Do my patients take fish oil? Yes, but I have them take fish oil with proven effective medication.”

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