Hopes new research from SFU can impact ADD treatment
Posted April 17, 2014 9:01 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BURNABY (NEWS1130) – There is hope for those dealing with attention deficit disorders; work being done at Simon Fraser University could eventually impact the way ADD is viewed and treated.
Imagine trying to work on a specific task and not being able to filter out the barrage of irrelevant information coming your way. Associate Psychology Professor John McDonald says that’s what the research has centred on.
He and doctoral student John Gaspar recorded the brain electricity of 47 students and found a signal coming from the brain that’s linked to suppressing irrelevant things around us.
Their study is the first to show our brains rely on a mechanism to avoid being distracted by irrelevant information when they want to focus on one thing.
He says they’ve characterized how the brain usually deals with those distractors “and that might help us later on figure out… whether individuals with some form of attention deficit have a specific deficit in dealing with distractors.”
McDonald adds if that’s the case, they can then look at how to treat it.
He tells us they’re starting to do some research to learn more about when the brain relies on the mechanism.
“Like any basic research, we don’t know quite yet whether or not there’s going to be far-reaching ramifications for treatment of various disorders because we don’t know if those disorders are actually specific disorders of, for example in this case, attentional suppression.”
“Most treatments of ADD are really focusing on getting people to attend better to the things that they’re supposed to be attending to, so this is another aspect of it. We know that people can attend to certain things. In fact, when you look at, for example, individuals with schizophrenia who have some attention disorders, they don’t seem to have a problem with attending to things that they’re supposed to attend to. So, it’s our hunch that maybe some of these individuals will have some deficits in being able to do that other thing, to be able to suppress things that they’re not supposed to be attending to. But we don’t know yet.”
