Brain Scans Reveal Drugs' Effects On Attention

Can doctors, parents, teachers, and children finally not have to go through the pains of finding the right "concoction" of medicine to help their children with attention deficits? Many parents are leery of putting their children with attention deficit disorders on medication. The most commonly used drug to treat attention disorders is Ritalin, and before recent studies, the use of it depended heavily on the Doctor's willingness to prescribe it, parents comfort with the use of it, and the severity of the child's disorder. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found they are able to use brain scans to see if drugs increase the levels of dopamine in the brain. Sixty to eighty percent of children with Neurofibromatosis type 1 or NF1 have some type of attention disorder. In a study performed last year on mice, researchers found that Ritalin increased the levels of dopamine, causing attention deficits to return to normal. This finding creates a molecular basis for the use of Ritalin, which may bring about an increase in using the drug to treat children with attention deficit disorders. Robert March found that working with the imaging element Raclopride binds to dopamine receptors and can be detected by PET scans. With this knowledge, Jinbin Xu found that using Raclopride PET imaging can be used for preclinical testing of drugs and how they affect brain dopamine levels. Not only can they test Ritalin, researchers found that other drugs that block recycling of dopamine were successful in restoring dopamine levels. All of these tests on mice have showed prospects in being able to avoid the ups and downs of having to toy with different prescriptions in order to help kids with attention deficit disorders. However, using these tests with PET scans on children exposes them to too much radiation. Luckily, at the University of Washington, there is a new scanner which combines PET and MRI machines. This allows for lower radiation exposure. Hopefully, the use of this research, and this machine, will put an end to the months of guess work of prescribing drugs to children with attention disordes. With this new research, doctors can find the perfect medication for each individual child more quickly.

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