It’s a matter of everyday knowledge that the CNS stimulants increase sexual desire and intensify sexual feeling.  That’s one of the reasons that cocaine and methamphetamine are such popular drugs of abuse.
There are differences among the stimulants, however, in the intensity of such reactions.  Such intensification of sex drive is not as common or as [...]
Blood pressure. It’s one of the basic measures of health.  We take blood pressure for granted unless it is way too high or far too low. Traditionally a reading of 120/80 millimeters of mercury has been the ideal blood pressure.    These days internists want blood pressure to be 135/85 or less.  Higher than that is “hypertension,”  elevated blood pressure [...]
Someday we will be able to tell which patients will do well by which medications by looking at their genes.  This will happen for ADHD patients as well as for many other kind of patients.  When that information is available, instead of the current system of, “first we’ll try this, and if it doesn’t work [...]
Many people worry about the CNS stimulants.  They worry that they are abused or that users become addicted.  I haven’t seen those problems in my patients. From my reading and conferring with other colleagues, my experience is typical.
We clinicians think that adults with ADHD can profit by taking the medications for a long time. The facts are that many patients don’t [...]
The search is always on for new ways to treat ADHD, especially treatments other than medications.  A recent study reports on using biofeedback training of children with ADHD. The results may  apply to adults as well.
The 23 children in the study were all boys, aged 8-13, with inattentive, hyperactive or combined types of ADHD. They [...]
That got your attention, didn’t it?
No, it’s not a misspelling: the word is formication, not fornication. What does formication mean,  and what does that have to do with ADHD?  Interesting questions.  Ones which give me a chance to talk about little-known side effects of medications.
Formication (with an “m”) is a kind of hallucination. We’re accustomed to [...]
As promised, I’m back with further information on ADHD and bipolar disorder :
A  disturbingly high percentage of children who have bipolar disorder also have ADHD, somewhere from 60 to 90 percent.Â
What about the combination in adults?  In a study of 189 adults with bipolar disorder (mean age 37 years) investigators reported childhood hyperactivity in 21.3% of the study participants. That’s [...]
Today I said I’d be writing about bipolar disorder, and I will get back to that topic.  But yesterday a patient brought up an issue that needs exploring.
He told me that since he had seen me last that he had been feeling poorly.  He attributed that to side effects of his medication.  So he stopped [...]
What does bipolar disorder have to do with ADHD?
First I have to explain what bipolar disorder is. When I was doing my training in Psychiatry,  clinicians taught that bipolar disorder was a severe, unusual psychiatric illness.  Its features were major mood swings, from severe “downs,” depressive episodes, to wild “ups,” manic episodes.  The affected person swung from one pole [...]
Adults with ADHD often have reservations about taking medication for their symptoms.   It’s ironic that many of them have been self-medicating for years.
Caffeine is probably the commonest self-medication that people with ADHD use.  I have had patients who started off the day by drinking a full pot of caffeinated coffee, or who drank 4 Starbucks ventis ( [...]
