Researchers have made a breakthrough in understanding the exact age children begin to develop prominent attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits.
Problems with attention, sensory processing, and executive control became more prominent mental considerations between the age of 6 and 9, tailing off as the child approaches adolescence.
The study classified this period as the prime stage of child development when signs of ADHD could be more noticeable to parents. This can be seen through parts of the brain that experience different levels of activity and growth compared to their neurotypical peers.
The findings could be utilized to enhance our understanding of the developmental trajectory of ADHD, say researchers at the Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH).
The team conducted a study featuring 157 children with ADHD and 109 children without the condition in a control group. Participants were placed into age groups: 6 to 7 years, 8 to 9 years, and 10 to 12 years old.
Each child was monitored using a non-invasive MRI technique called arterial spin labeling (ASL) perfusion, which does not require injections or contrast agents. Instead, magnets are used to "tag" the blood in the arteries before it reaches the brain, without radiation exposure. The MRI scanner traces the tracked blood as it reaches the brain to measure the cerebral blood flow (CBF) as it travels around it.
This method found that there are parts of the brain where children diagnosed with ADHD experience less CBF than their peers, particularly areas that manifest in the key characteristics of the disorder: sensorimotor regions, crucial for integrating sensory and motor functions, and the prefrontal cortex for executive function.
The study was also able to determine that participants with ADHD experience higher blood flow in certain areas—indicative of slower brain maturation, as first purported by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services in 2007.
The typical prefrontal cortex of a participant with ADHD is roughly three years behind, reaching peak cortical thickness at 10.5 years, while neurotypically developing children do so at 7.5 years.
"This study demonstrates the potential of ASL-MRI to non-invasively diagnose and evaluate changes in brain function in children with ADHD across different ages," said Professor Sohn, a radiology specialist at SNUH, in a statement.
"This is particularly important when researching younger children to observe brain functional changes as they age. We plan to conduct further multidisciplinary research on both structural and functional changes in the brain."
The research used in this article was conducted by SNUH. You can view the work in full here.
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