Change Your Brain Every Day - Can a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Give You ADD?

Episode Date: May 3, 2018

Signs of ADD usually first occur at a very young age, but what if you start showing these signs later in life? Could ADD actually be caused by a physical incident such at a brain injury? In this episode, Dr. Daniel and Tana discuss a new study which reveals some surprising data. 

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Welcome back. Thank you so much for the reviews for the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Great information to help unlock the anxiety my daughter has struggled with for years. Clear, concise, and very helpful, if not a little insane. Thank you. Did she actually say that?

No, I haven't. This is from Bonick001. Rather than 007, this is 001 from Canada. We love our friends from Canada. Thank you for the mental health check-in. Really enjoyed this podcast. Well, bless you so much. All right. There's a new study out today on can traumatic brain injury give you ADHD? And the answer was absolutely yes. I know we've talked a lot about ADD in the podcast. We've also talked a lot about traumatic brain injury. But this study was so clear that kids who experienced a traumatic brain injury, even without a loss of consciousness, years later were more likely to be diagnosed with ADD. So even if they didn't have ADD as kids, they could experience ADD later?

Right. In fact, it's one of the questions I often ask if I get an adult that comes to see me and they clearly have ADD of one form or another. Like, how'd you do in school? Great. What did teachers say about you? I was awesome. They loved me. Consistent. How long did a half an hour of homework take you to get done? Half an hour, maybe 20 minutes my focus was really good and now it's not and so when now it's not when it was good the things to think about traumatic brain injury were you in a car accident have your hormones changed right is that can do are you depressed because that can actually make you look like you have ADD when it's not ADD. Have you had, I had one of my patients just this week get bit by a big tick.

Have you gotten an infection like Lyme? I mean, there are all sorts of reasons why. Do you have mold exposure in your house? And, you know, one of the big lessons I've learned from looking at now we're over 140,000 scans is did you hit your head? And I remember when I asked you that, you told me no. They know this already. You have like said, you just love to point out that I said no repeatedly. You also said no when I wanted you to be my sweetheart. We ended up fixing that problem, didn't we? You just pride yourself on that. So the thought comes to me though with this, and that is how frustrating it's got to be

for people who, I mean, now we're having a paradigm shift. We have people, you know, there's some enlightenment, but for people who have suffered for so long and, you know, this, the, first of all, there's so many people who just absolutely didn't believe in ADD at all. And then there are those people who, if they didn't believe in ADD, definitely did not believe that ADD could exist in adults. So those people suffered for a long time. And I wouldn't say unnecessarily so, but it's... Unnecessarily so. Yeah. Okay. So unnecessarily so. If you could have fixed that problem.

And that's kind of sad. It's very sad. Oh, it's super sad. And in fact, I actually published a study many years ago on ADD in the elderly. Right. That when they have symptoms, their symptoms are worse. Because if you take low activity in your frontal lobes, usually associated with ADD, and then you add aging on top of it, it just, it makes things worse. And the beautiful thing is it can be treated. One of my favorite stories is of a 94-year-old woman who came to see me. And I'm like, why are you here? And she said, well,

you helped my great-grandson well, you helped my great grandson and you helped my granddaughter and you helped my son. And I realized they all got it from me. And she said, I want to finish the paper. I've never been able to finish the paper. And we scanned her. She clearly had ADD and I treated her. And a month later, she came back and she's beaming

because she told me she'd read her first book. That's so cute. And you know if it doesn't go away by the time you're 20 it's probably never going away. Right but what we're talking about here is that maybe even if you didn't have it when you're young so the person we've been working with lately we've mentioned this person a few times but I want to point this out because this is really important. She was a really good student. And an awesome writer. Was given a column in the local newspaper when she was 15 because of her writing ability. Really amazing.

And then went off the tracks. Okay. Yes, started doing drugs, but also had multiple car accidents. So there were some issues there. Because she had something called the Erlen syndrome. We should actually do a podcast on that. Right. But follow me here. So we had multiple reasons accidents. So there were some issues there. Because she had something called the Erlen syndrome. We should actually do a podcast on that. Right. But let me, but follow me here. So we had multiple reasons why. This is ADD. I can't follow you. So the point being had just tragedy after tragedy, after tragedy happened really difficult

throughout life, you know, was either bored or couldn't maintain jobs for whatever reason. And then just recently, when you treated her ADD, it was literally like someone put glasses on her. It was crazy. I mean, I've never even seen something that extreme. That was miraculous. She literally like was doing backflips. The next day she called me. She's like, my brain has, I just realized has never worked. For the past 30 years, my brain has not worked.

And it just, it suddenly works. And it's like, since then, now she's got two jobs. She doesn't have one job. She has two jobs, which she's excelling at. Both of them. And so it's just this like, I was thinking to myself how painful that must have been to feel like a failure for all those years. And if you think about it, she actually had, so she had 19 car accidents.

So think of the force associated in one of them. She rolled the car two and a half times. You were in it. And, but the drug abuse was also a brain injury. People don't really understand that. That drug abuse damages the brain. And but the exciting news is you can repair it if you put the brain in a healing environment. Yeah. And it just, it just now, it makes my heart break because when I think about how much pain

there must have been, But now there's hope. And the excitement is so exciting. Well, I think about how much judgment this woman faced from her. Oh, from me. So let's just call it like it is. When you grow up in a house with drug addicts like I did and the effects of drugs yeah I wasn't I wasn't kind about it so it was because I'm the one helping this person now so you want I mean yes I'm helping her so there is that I mean I'm the person trying to really help her

but at the same time I'm like constantly kicking her in the rear because it's frustrating to me and as somebody so I'm trying to think of what you are a combination so there's a little bit of Mother Teresa there. That is true. With Rambo, maybe? Maybe. Yeah, or like Liam Neeson. And Dakin.

I'm just, you know. There is a weird. And it's like, that's what it feels like when you're helping someone like that. Because it's like, you're hugging them, you're encouraging them, and then the next thing you know, you're kicking them in the butt. And then you're hugging them and you're encouraging them and you're kicking them in the butt. Anybody listening to this knows what I'm talking about. It's just a fact. All right. So the take-home lessons is if you have ADD as a child, head injuries will make

it worse. Get treated and stop doing stupid things with your head. If you didn't have it as a child, but you notice short attention span, distractibility, restlessness, disorganization, procrastination, poor impulse control, it could be the result of a traumatic brain injury that can be healed. And so for our books, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life,

Chapter 19 is how we rehabilitate our NFL players or read Memory Rescue. I mean, that's the whole rehabilitation program that we do here at Amen Clinics. Oh, by the way, so many people from the podcast have been calling the call center. Oh, about the code. And using the special code, listen at the end of the podcast, we'll tell it to you, and have actually come to see us

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