Because emotional disorders and attention disorders so often go hand
in hand, every child who has ADHD should be checked for accompanying
anxiety and depression.  Anxiety and depression can be treated, and
helping children handle such strong, painful feelings will help them
cope with and overcome the effects of ADHD.
Of course, not all children with ADHD have an additional disorder.
Nor do all people with learning disabilities, Tourette's syndrome,
oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, anxiety, or depression
have ADHD.  But when they do occur together, the combination of
problems can seriously complicate a person's life.  For this reason,
it's important to watch for other disorders in children who have ADHD.
What Causes ADHD?
Understandably, one of the first questions parents ask when they learn
their child has an attention disorder is "Why?  What went wrong?"
Health professionals stress that since no one knows what causes ADHD,
it doesn't help parents to look backward to search for possible reasons.
There are too many possibilities to pin down the cause with certainty.
It is far more important for the family to move forward in finding
ways to get the right help.
Scientists, however, do need to study causes in an effort to identify
better ways to treat, and perhaps some day, prevent ADHD.  They are
finding more and more evidence that ADHD does not stem from home
environment, but from biological causes.  When you think about it,
there is no clear relationship between home life and ADHD.  Not all
children from unstable or dysfunctional homes have ADHD.  And not
all children with ADHD come from dysfunctional families.  Knowing
this can remove a huge burden of guilt from parents who might blame
themselves for their child's behavior.
Over the last decades, scientists have come up with possible theories
about what causes ADHD.  Some of these theories have led to dead ends,
some to exciting new avenues of investigation.
One disappointing theory was that all attention disorders and learning
disabilities were caused by minor head injuries or undetectable damage
to the brain, perhaps from early infection or complications at birth.
Based on this theory, for many years both disorders were called
"minimal brain damage" or "minimal brain dysfunction."  Although
certain types of head injury can explain some cases of attention
disorder, the theory was rejected because it could explain only a
very small number of cases. Not everyone with ADHD or LD has a
history of head trauma or birth complications.
Another theory was that refined sugar and food additives make children
hyperactive and inattentive.  As a result, parents were encouraged to
stop serving children foods containing artificial flavorings,
preservatives, and sugars.  However, this theory, too, came under
question.  In 1982, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the
Federal agency responsible for biomedical research, held a major
scientific conference to discuss the issue.  After studying the data,
the scientists concluded that the restricted diet only seemed to help
about 5 percent of children with ADHD, mostly either young children or
children with food allergies.
... 67.387% of all statistics are worthless!
--- PPoint 2.03
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