Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD.
I'm your host William Curb, and I have ADHD on this podcast.
I dig in the tools, tactics, and best practices to help
you work with your ADHD Brain.
Today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our research recap series.
In this series, we look at a single research paper, dive into what the
paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called Evaluation
of Maternal Inflammation as a Marker of Future Offspring, ADHD symptoms,
A prospective investigation.
And so this is a study that is investigating like these biological
origins of ADHD and you know, more specifically whether a mother's
immune system during pregnancy might be able to predict ADHD symptoms in
those children once they're born.
So yeah, it's pretty dense paper, I thought.
There was a lot here, let's get into it.
Yeah.
And I will say it's great.
This is why I love doing this Will, because I so much appreciate
that you are willing to go into this denser paper with me.
and I wanna say upfront, when we're going through this paper.
We are not experts in the medical field, and this particular
paper is also very preliminary.
So at the end it specifically references that the purpose of
this paper is to decide what needs to be studied more in depth.
So they looked at 68 children from 62 women who were pregnant,
in an outpatient clinic.
And basically they wanted to understand if.
The biomarkers for inflammation in the second trimester were
connected to symptoms of ADHD, not ADHD diagnosis in later in life.
and they were looking at that from teachers and also
from the parents themselves.
So there was a, it, it took quite a long time.
This paper, it was, it was more of a longitudinal study.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I was really impressed with yeah, they were like looking at stuff.
With mother during pregnancy and then following up with those children
who are born and like looking at those symptoms and being like,
yeah, what are we seeing here?
What,
'cause yeah, you have to look at both that before and after effects and seeing
what does, and that is, that's a long term
Mm-hmm.
A hundred percent.
And what they were.
Doing when they were doing those initial measures is they were measuring things
like maternal distress, other things like this, which can affect inflammation.
And they did try and control for some of those.
and then they were also looking at, the.
You know, blood samples and they were testing them to understand
what the inflammation looked like.
They said they couldn't draw the blood samples at the same time
of the day for all participants.
And we do know that inflammation can change due due to so many
factors, including time of day.
So I wanted to zoom out here a little bit, will, and actually just say for
those of, for those people who are listening and they're like, okay, cool.
I've heard of inflammation.
But, but what is it?
What are we actually looking for?
Yeah.
So yeah.
'cause as a pop culture reference, there's all sorts of things
about inflammation that are less than scientifically accurate.
and so I guess like specifically for this study, they were really, they
were doing like these, Blood sample collections and, looking at the, cytokine
levels and being like, Hey, like what,
what are those levels?
But I guess your question is like, what is inflammation?
And that is a hard, straight up definition without, when you don't
go into oh, this, these levels.
But it is the, your, basically like your immune system being
reactive to what's going on.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And they did measure what they called cytokinin levels.
They had, different ways of thinking about this.
And this, was essentially.
Looking at, the small protein, sorry, I'm gonna read this because I did
read, I did my own search into it.
The small proteins used by, systems to communicate, essentially those
are the cytokine levels and that is what they were, they were trying
to measure as part of predicting, both whether they had inflammation.
And also whether that inflammation was related to later ADHD symptoms.
and yeah, like I said, there wasn't a diagnosis, so they
did find a relationship, which was interesting because.
You know, it was, it does indicate that there is potentially ssociation and
I will say for me, this is one of the first times, 'cause when you said we
should research this, I was interested in this because I've heard about.
The fact that there could be a relationship that isn't genetic.
But I have to say, I have been a little bit biased against this idea that
there is something, you know, that can be a associated with ADHD that isn't
genetic because it feels like that's always used in a, how do I put this?
Like a not good faith way.
Yeah, yeah.
Often it's.
Blaming the parents for how a kid turned out.
It's oh yeah, you didn't feed them enough broccoli.
And now they have ADHD kind of things.
it's just this is,
yeah, not, it is just bad faith.
It's these things where they're just trying to sell you a supplement or
something to cure your ADHD often.
Exactly.
And you know, as I was saying to Will, like, I just recently had my third
baby, and I, you know, the conversation about being calm, being healthy, like
that's always a part of the conversation of, you know, giving birth and, and
trying to, you know, remember that.
But it's, it's nine months.
Like, the chances that I'm gonna be relaxed and not inflamed for a whole nine
months is, that's a, that's a big ask.
Yeah, and I mean I think that's an important thing to also consider
when we're looking at this study.
'cause they didn't have a lot of tests during the pregnancy.
It was, like one test during the third trimester.
So while that might be able to like.
Be great with looking at chronic inflammation.
If you also are just having a very stressful day getting to the hospital, you
might be having that immune response too.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, like for us, you know, there's, you're doing a whole bunch of tests,
there's a whole bunch of things going on.
You have toddlers, like at this point I have two other little kids that are, that
are creating, you know, a little bit of, a stress, compared to having my first baby.
So yeah, there's all of these different pieces that could.
Affected.
And, and I will say to their credit, they did recognize that.
And so for them this was, if we jump back to, you know, what they
were really looking for and why they said that this is important because
ADHD in their words was so costly and, you know, difficult to alter.
so being able to evaluate the merits of.
Whether it would make sense to do deeper research that requires more
testing over time, which is obviously very, you know, a lot of work
for, for moms could be necessary.
So, I'm, I'm really curious about this, what this would mean.
I mean, like.
They've done this study, they've found that there's an association.
Somebody, somebody then goes ahead and does a deeper study into this.
What would it change if they did find that there was some serious connection
between inflammation and ADHD?
it would change some of the recommendations on, what we're asking
mothers to do to reduce that forehand.
Like we, there's like already recommendations for things like folate
and all these other, like prenatal vitamins and stuff and, maybe adding.
Stuff that can help with, anti-inflammation could be
something that they're like, Hey, yeah, this will also help.
the, because it's also, again, these are, we're not looking
at an ADHD diagnosis here.
We're looking at these symptoms.
And so it's being like, oh yeah, we're just looking to reduce the chance
that they're having these, symptoms of being part of, their growing up.
'cause we all know ADHD is hard.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and you do get a lot more criticism and, and you know, it can
be difficult to be in a classroom if you struggle with ADHD symptoms.
I mean, we could talk about whether this means you should change the
classroom or whatever, but you know, besides the point of this conversation.
Yeah.
And one of the, interesting pieces that I was thinking about while reading this
too, and, based on what you were saying earlier with like seeing this as a.
Non-genetic thing, but it could still be in this idea of, epigenetics where you
have like the gene expression and certain environmental factors making it so that
these genes are turned on, quote unquote.
And so it's being like, oh yeah, maybe we can just, if we see this
inflammation connection, maybe there are other further line things too,
that we can also change how these genes are expressed when you're an adult.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
I mean, you know, they, they said maternal inflammation predicted teacher
report of child, ADHD symptoms at a significant level, which is kind of.
And, you know, it feels crazy because it's, the two things are so far apart.
The, the study was so, like, you had so many holes in it in
terms of, you know, the number of people and all of those things.
They could easily have found a non-significant result.
but yeah, I hope.
If they do more of this research and they find this is important, and this
does affect epigenetic switches, that they don't just make this another
thing that moms have to deal with.
Because as somebody who had a baby last year, that would not be
viable or helpful in any way.
Yeah, because often at times there's just yeah, moms need to do all these things,
plus all these other things, and if you're not, you're just being a bad mom.
And it's that's telling moms that it's very stressful and probably not helping.
I,
Yeah.
You probably increased information just by having that conversation.
So yeah, definitely hoping that if they do find this, it comes with a little bit
more of a, yeah, a systems based solution.
Awesome.
Yeah.
and I'm just seeing, do you think there's, anything else
we wanna jump into on this one?
I think really just.
The, this is kind of for us as part of the conversations we've been having the first
time we've looked at things that are a little bit below the brain and looking at
the body and this idea of inflammation.
So definitely something I think would be great to, to dig a little bit deeper on.
because it is an area that gets misrepresented to the point where.
You don't even know what to believe, like you said,
epigenetics, et cetera, et cetera.
but other than that, I think just regardless of, you know, if you're
struggling with ADHD, keep it in mind, but don't, don't hold it too tightly because
it's still a really emerging space.
Yeah, and I, I do think there is going to be stuff here that we see eventually,
but what that is is hard to predict.