ADHD Comorbidities

Book excerpt: The only book that covers the multiple ways in which ADHD is complicated by other psychiatric and learning disorders in both children and adults, ADHD Comorbidities: Handbook for ADHD Complications in Children and Adults features comprehensive, research-based information on ADHD and its full range of coexisting syndromes. Contributing researcher-clinicians, familiar with the complications that additional disorders pose, summarize in accessible language what is currently known about ADHD and its comorbidities, from preschool age to adulthood. These authors describe how ADHD leads to different profiles at different stages of development and how to adjust treatment strategies for both ADHD and additional disorders to reduce the impairments resulting from their combination. The book offers a new paradigm for understanding ADHD, viewing it not as a simple behavior disorder but as a complex developmental impairment of executive functions in the brain. This important handbook gives developmental context to ADHD by describing how symptoms at preschool onset differ from those of older age at onset. Clinicians will find practical help for patients whose ADHD appears in conjunction with 11 other syndromes -- from mood disorders to developmental coordination disorder -- and acquire valuable guidance on adapting and adjusting medications and other interventions to optimize treatment effects for the wide diversity of complex cases that embody ADHD.