14 DAY TRIAL // According to new researches, ADHD patients have a tendency to start smoking earlier than other teenagers. This could happen for a variety of reason, psychologists say, including the feelings of being misunderstood or marginalized. Also, the survey revealed that the level of nicotine addiction is higher in ADHD sufferers than in regular smokers.
Teenagers who grow up with ADHD supposedly start smoking since childhood because they are very prone to influences around them. If some of their older friends or their parents are smoking around them, they can catch the habit too. This had scientists puzzled, because standard attention deficit medication also includes some tobacco and nicotine based products. Apparently, kids with the syndrome began smoking about a year and a half before those in selected control groups.
Also, 69 percent of ADHD patients analyzed by the study reported having smoked sometime during their lives and 41 percent of the total said that they were currently smoking. Experts noticed a huge difference between those teenagers and the ones in the control groups, only 44 percent of which ever smoked. In the control groups, only 17 percent of participants were smoking at the time the survey was conducted by the Massachusetts General Hospital.
A disturbing discovery pointed to the fact that the more ADHD symptoms all teenagers in both groups exhibited, the more their dependency on nicotine increased. Factors such as living next to smokers, distraction, prominent inattention, hyperactivity or impulsiveness contributed to their addiction to nicotine. Study author Timothy Wilens, MD, director of the Substance Abuse Program at the MGH Pediatric Psychopharmacology Department, said that the study "(...) also gives us clues about how the neurotransmitter systems involved in ADHD and tobacco use may be interacting."
Although the team already identified smoking mothers as posing a higher risk of ADHD for their children and, implicitly, for them becoming smokers when they grow up, Wilens says that further studies are required to understand the complex connections that form inside the brain of addicted patients. "It looks like interplay between the dopamine system, more substantially related to ADHD and addiction, and the cholinergic system related to smoking is probably important," he explained, adding that this would probably be one of the future research directions in the field.