REPOST: "For Kids With ADHD, Sleep Disturbances May Interfere With Emotional Memories"

As it is, ADHD causes many inconveniences to those who get afflicted with it.  On top of that, recent studies suggest another undesired sequela affecting one's emotional sphere. Learn more by reading this TIME article:

Image credit: TIME.com

Kids and adolescents with ADHD often struggle to keep their emotions in check. ADHD has also been linked to sleep disorders, which is one of the reasons a team of German researchers sought to determine how sleep influences the consolidation and processing of emotional memories.

Brain imaging studies have shown that ADHD alters the structure and functions of areas of the brain important to processing emotions, like the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala and the hippocampus. Scientists have speculated that a disrupted connection between these areas of the brain could contribute to a patient’s day-to-day emotions.

Among healthy children and adults, sleep facilitates the processing of emotional stimuli, so the researchers wanted to see if there were processing differences between healthy study subjects and participants with ADHD. For their study, researchers led by Alexander Prehn-Kristensen of University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein analyzed the emotional memory processing of 16 children with ADHD, 16 healthy children and 20 healthy adults.

In the study, the participants were shown photos that were either emotionally negative, like a snake or growling bear, or emotionally neutral, like an umbrella or lamp. Previous research has shown that emotionally charged images usually have a greater brain response, and are more likely to be remembered.

“During daytime, people suffering from ADHD often have problems focusing on the relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information. Here, we wanted to look whether the described daytime problem in contrasting between relevant and irrelevant information is also observable during sleep,” says study author Alexander Prehn-Kristensen, study researcher from Christian-Albrecht-university in Kiel, Germany in an email response.

All the participants were shown the photos in the evening and had their sleep monitored by the researchers using electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements to track brain activity. The next day, the participants were tested on their recollection of the emotion-inducing images.

The healthy kids without ADHD were better able to recall the images compared to the kids with ADHD and even the healthy adults. These kids had higher activity in the frontal region of their brain and could remember the emotional images better than the neutral ones. Emotional experiences are typically easier to remember than neutral memories.

Prehn-Kristensen says more research is necessary before any therapeutic or clinical conclusions should be drawn. Since the children’s memories were observed in an artificial context, they cannot presume these results carry over to day-to-day memory experiences. However, they do shed light on how brain activity issues during sleep could be responsible for emotional processing for kids with ADHD.

The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

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Child Maltreatment Linked To Mental And Physical Health Disorders In Later Life

Find out how child maltreatment can lead to mental and physical disorders when they get old from this Medical News Today article.

Child physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect is linked to mental health disorders, drug use, suicide attempts, sexually transmitted infections and risky sexual behaviour in adulthood, according to a study released today by researchers at The University of Queensland (UQ).

The researchers, led by Dr Rosana Norman from UQ's School of Population Health and Queensland Children's Medical Research Institute, also found evidence that child maltreatment increased the risk of chronic diseases and life-style risk factors such as smoking in later life.

The authors, who also included researchers from the World Health Organization, reviewed all published studies that included health outcomes for individuals who had been physically or emotionally abused or neglected in childhood.

Most of the 124 studies included in their analysis were from high income countries (Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand) but only 16 studies used a prospective design in which researchers followed abused or neglected children over time to identify later health outcomes.

They found that individuals who had been emotionally abused as children were about three times more likely to develop depression, while individuals who had been physically abused or neglected were one-and-a-half to two times more likely to develop depression than people who had not been abused or neglected.

Researchers also established a link between anxiety disorders, drug abuse, and suicidal behaviour and childhood abuse.

They also found that children who had been maltreated had a higher risk of sexually transmitted infections and/or risky sexual behaviour as adults than people who had not experienced abuse.

Dr Norman said the evidence suggests a causal relationship between non-sexual child maltreatment and a range of mental disorders.

She said the study confirms that all forms of child maltreatment should be considered important risks to health with a sizeable impact on major contributors to the burden of disease in all parts of the world.

"The awareness of the serious long-term consequences of child maltreatment should encourage better identification of those at risk and the development of effective interventions to protect children from violence," she said.

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/253386.php