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A comment on Me and ADHD. Parent comment

Re:Me and ADHD by sizzle on Monday February 01, 2021 @07:50PM (#25996201)
My fear is developing alzheimers or parkinsons disease messing with these dopamine receptors for decades, are we screwing ourselves over long term? I fear developing early onset dementia too. I saw there was a study that linked neurodegenerative disease to long term dopamine stimulants.

Can anyone break down the neuroscience for me and any meta-analyses studies on ADHD amph stims effect on early onset neurodegenerative disease?

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Re:Me and ADHD by username90 on Monday February 01, 2021 @08:19PM (#25996427)
Looks like they actually protects against Parkinson's.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20089748v...

I found no relationships with Alzheimer's.

The only big negative found seems to be blood pressure, but you can manage that just by keeping your weight in check and exercising regularly. I take medication and my blood pressure is at normal levels, I go for regular checkups.

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Re:Me and ADHD by slaymaker1907 on Monday February 01, 2021 @08:35PM (#25996540)
Thank you for the link. When I started seeing my current doctor, they tried scare mongering by claiming stimulants can cause Parkinsons. There is a study to back this up [1,2], but I was skeptical of it since they didn't seem to control for the fact that someone with ADHD but not on stimulants could either have less intense ADHD or perhaps have some other confounding condition.

The study authors actually mention:

"The association of ADHD patients prescribed psychostimulants with higher risk of diseases of the basal ganglia and cerebellum may reflect a more severe ADHD phenotype rather than a direct association between prescribed stimulant use and basal ganglia or cerebellum disorders."[2]

It's somewhat encouraging to see that this seems to be true and increased chance of Parkinson's is likely due to the severity of ADHD and not due to medication which helps people with ADHD be functional.

[1]: https://healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/news/2018/09/adhd-... [2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30209407/

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