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ADHD/Autism = same thing theory?
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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neurodiverse
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What is Neurodivergence?
It's ADHD, Autism, OCD, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, bi-polar, aspd, etc etc etc etc
“neurologically atypical patterns of thought or behavior”
So, it’s very broad, if you feel like it describes you then it does as far as we're concerned
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Short version, no, they have radically different neurological differences. Leading edge research on autism shows that there's a pattern of an overabundance of neurons in the brain at birth and an over-correction of nero pruning. Whereas the psychiatric science is settled on ADHD - several brain structures either underdevelop or develop much more slowly.
The proof is in the results, stimulants are life changing for people with ADHD, but doesn't help with autism.
Cool. Unqualified speculation: what if the autistic neuro pruning results in damage to executive function, dopamine receptors, whatever else ADHD can be underdevelopement of? In that logically possible scenario ADHD is autism.
Good question! My understanding is that these things are different developments heading in different directions. Autism being pre-over developed brain parts, and ADHD starting with less neurological tools to work with and building slower.
This doesn't mean that both can't occur in the same person, the human brain is wildly complex. But also, if both conditions left the same part of the brain in a similar physical/neurological configuration, I'm sure there'd be some crossover traits.
Sure. But, continuing to speculate, what if these are two routes that can lead to the same place? It’s said that many grow out of it, so suppose if someone with adhd also is also slower at picking up social skills and other autistic traits and thus appears to have AuDHD, but then looks the same over time as an autist who learns to mask. Or, I find highly realistic being autistic and not held back in executive function and dopamine receptors and whatever, but simply never developing to near neurotypical levels. I don’t know if I explained that well, but basically AuDHDers could have kind of similar things in different ways - a different mechanism and process- or, of course one could have both in both ways. Some parts permanently limited or extra, some developing slower and making its way toward normality.
Btw, do you have any good further reading recommendations?
I suppose anything is possible with the complexity of our brains, but it might be too specific (and maybe rare?) to have any research that targets this specifically. Your best bet would honestly be to reach out to a psychiatry department at a research university. Maybe see if their research assistants can help you find something, or if there's a psychiatrist who could talk with you. You're going to want to talk to psychiatrists specifically, they're medical doctors specializing in the brain, not psychologists.
As for further reading... Hit the stacks lol! I'm not sure you'll find many good books on this granular of a question, so you might need to dig into research papers. One specialist in ADHD that I know of is Dr. Russell Barkley, look him up for a good primer.
Sounds daunting. I will try to read more papers and more of Barkley’s stuff.
Daunting questions require daunting research to answer lol!
The thing I tell people most of the time is that they're not the same thing, but they're close cousins.
True. I do feel an obligation to do more research before contacting a university tho.
To speculate wildly, that would make more sense than the disorders being a spectrum of one another.
It's important to think about this stuff with a scientific perspective as well. These theories to the underlying mechanism are working understandings based on available evidence. They're far from being proven fact, or even consensus, and it's entirely possible that there are confounding factors that aren't being taken into account because of Donald Rumsfeld reasons. It might seem appealing to do, but connecting one working understanding to a second separate working understanding and then trying to synthesize novel conclusions from that doesn't really work.
We know a lot of the symptoms that present with both disorders, we know that the symptoms share a significant amount of overlap, we know that they co-present at a higher level than the baseline (if you have one you're more likely to be a person who has the other compared to regular-brained people), so it's highly likely that they have similar underlying physiology, but our understanding of that physiology isn't anywhere near complete enough to make a definitive guess.