ADHD
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), is considered to be a developmental disorder, mainly neurological in nature, affecting about 5% of the world’s population.
It is a disorder, and not a disease, that will appear in childhood and retain through a persons whole life-span although problems seem to be less severe later in life. Probably because you learn to “cope with it” and avoid situations that are most problematic.
The disorder is characterised by a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity, as well as forgetfulness, poor impulse control or impulsivity, and distractibility for which no medical cure is available. The disorder appears to be highly heritable, with contributions on occasion from trauma or toxic exposure. Methods of treatment usually involve some combination of medications, behaviour modifications, life style changes, and counselling. The symptoms of ADHD are not as profoundly different from normal behaviour as are those of other chronic mental disorders, they be a little bit “more than” than most others.
Still, ADHD has been shown to often impair functioning, and many adverse life outcomes are associated with ADHD.
ADHD is a difficult diagnosis to determine as many informants (parents, teacher, school-nurse, …) have their saying though questionnaires, own assessment and sometimes augmented with additional objective tests (CPT, Continuous Performance Tests) and estimation on motor activity. This often cause long waiting times for people to get to their first assessment.
The main three (core) symptoms of ADHD is as mentioned Inattention, Impulsiveness and Motor Activity.
Opatus CPTA measures these three entities, but is not an ADHD test.
We measure objectively how much you move the mobile; how many errors you do and which; how consistent the response is and the overall reaction time.
We leave it to the clinician to determine why these entities may be impotent to quantify for a specific patient.