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A
Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T mobile is in US cellular stores. Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits. Plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. Today we'll attempt a feat once thought impossible. Overcoming high interest credit card debt. It requires merely one thing, a SoFi personal loan. With it you could save big on interest charges by consolidating into one low fixed rate monthly payment. Defy high interest debt with a SOFI personal loan. Visit sofi.com stunt to learn more. Loans originated by Sofi Bank NA member FDIC2 terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891.
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Welcome to Hacking youg adhd. I'm your host William Kirp and I have adhd. On this podcast, I dig into 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 take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and, and try and find any practical takeaways. In this episode we're going to be discussing a paper called association between Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Intestinal Disorders A Systematic Review and Meta analysis. And this was a really interesting one because there was a ton of data here that they went over like they started off with over almost 2,000 papers that they were looking at and then like narrowed it down to 11. But we'll get into that in a little bit.
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C
Yeah, 100%. So this paper pulling this paper came about because we were talking about the, the associations that we sometimes have with adhd. You know, we know about ADHD and dyslexia, ADHD and autism, like those kinds of things. But there's other very strange connections that we don't always know about. So we went on a bit of a hunt to find something that was, you know, very well reviewed. There were other things as well, like chronic fatigue syndrome, there was a sleep apnea, there was conduct disorders, there was hyper hypermobility. Came up a couple of times as well. But the one that had the most up to date recent data was intestinal disorders, which I thought was fascinating because I, I don't struggle personally with This. I know some people who do who have adhd, but this, like. Like you said. Well, there's a lot of data about this topic.
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B
Yeah. I mean, I was looking at some of the papers that were cited in this one. Not the ones that they were studying, but the cited ones. And there was one from 1987, you know, like, physical signs and symptoms in preschool age, hyperactivity, normal, that was asking about these questions of irritable bowels and being like, hey, this is something we've noticed. And I'm like, this is not something new. This is something that it's been around for a while.
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C
Before ADHD was well known, apparently people really wanted to know the answer to this question.
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B
Yeah. Which, I mean, it was funny, too, because I, like, glanced through the abstract of that paper. I'm like, they're not even calling it adhd. They're calling it ADD H. So it's like attention deficit hyper. Or Attention deficit disorder hyperactive. You know that at the time, that was not wrong. That was like how they. What the DSM was calling on.
- [03:39]
C
Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, they found, you know, they were looking at this. They found children with ADHD reporting more constipation and flatulence. Flatulence syndrome. They talked about the different kinds of intestinal problems you can have. But this was all done through a systematic review and meta analysis, which basically means they did a key literature search of key databases. Um, they had a ton of studies, like you mentioned, and then they extracted those studies specifically to find the ones that met their criteria. So they excluded anything that was, you know, full text, not found, wrong study design. They, you know, diagnosis of ADHD or intestinal disorder was not made by a doctor or based on medical record, which I really appreciated. They weren't just going around asking the question. And in the end, yeah, they went all the way from, you know, a thousand studies, all the way down to 11, which is the ones that they looked at in more depth. So what did they find?
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B
Well, it's also interesting, even with going down to 11 studies, it still covered, you know, 3.8 million people in those 11 studies. So there's. There's a lot here.
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C
Yes.
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B
But, yeah, what they found was that there is a significant correlation between ADHD and ibs, but not other intestinal disorders. So just IBS was the one that they found a positive association with?
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C
Yeah, yeah. They didn't necessarily say the other ones couldn't be associated, but it was. It wasn't significant.
- [05:19]
B
Yeah. And so that was. I mean, I'm sure for A lot of people listening, they're like, oh, oh my God. I, I do have gut issues and that's something that, you know, maybe I should look into. This was something I thought about when listening to paper. There is. I'm never quite very far away from Gas X that I keep all over my house because don't need to be recording that in a podcast or anything. And it can be quite uncomfortable. So, I mean, that's really the, the reason is that, yeah, IBS is a. As funny as it is to say. Yeah, this study shows that kids with adhd fart more. 100%. That, that is something that said in here, but it is also a condition that is, you know, quite uncomfortable.
- [06:04]
C
Yeah, yeah, 100%. The fact that there is this association really brings into, into mind, okay, what is, what, why is this? You know, they said it affects the quality of life. It may further complicate the management of adhd. I also thought it was really interesting that they said methylphenidate increases the risk of abdominal pain in ADHD patients, which I'd never heard before.
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B
And so for people, that's like the ritalins and concerta side of things.
- [06:32]
C
Yeah, yeah. So that I couldn't. I was like, why did you put this at the end of the paper? Like, you know. But it leads to the next question, which is, okay, why might this be happening? Because they don't really go into that. And also, what does this, what does this mean? Because for a lot of people this is going to be a bit of a ha moment even for people who are struggling with ibs.
- [06:53]
B
Yeah. So their initial assessment and they're like, this is very early on. This is speculation. This is not research based yet. But they're like, when this probably has something to do with the gut microbiome and with ADHD being a developmental disease or development disorder, that it can be kind of seen how that might connect. There. There are a lot of, like, why might that happen? But it's. There's some. I, I've talked to people that go way further on this where they're like, the gut microbiome is the cause of adhd. And I'm like, let's not go there. That's. This is. I can see how you got there and I can see some of the thought patterns that would work to make that jump, like, fairly logical. But I'm also like, this is a very genetic thing. This is something where there are people that don't have IBS that have adhd. So that connection does not work that well. So this gut microbiome, though, then is like, oh, yeah, if we have these issues with the microbiome, that can then also exacerbate ADHD symptoms. So you might see worse ADHD symptoms because, like, yeah, hey, if I'm feeling awful, I'm going to have worse ADHD symptoms because I, my concentration can only go so many places and if it's constantly on my stomach, that's going to be a big distraction.
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C
Yeah, 100%. And so it was an interesting conversation about, you know, and I think this is, this is a conversation that's beyond the scope of this paper and honestly, kind of beyond the scope of either of our, you know, neither of us are, you know, irritable bowel syndrome doctors or anything like that. Maybe we should talk to one now that we've seen that this is a thing. But, you know, the conversation is, it's, it, is it something that is to do with the, you know, the medication? Is it something to do with the, is it, you know, just a part of how our guts work in general? Is it something to do with our behavior? That was a conversation that came up is like, do people with adhd, I mean, you know, we just did a paper. Do you talked about topics like bullying and things like that where it's, you know, coming up that people act differently and it's one of the reasons that people are perceived differently. Do people eat differently when they have adhd? I'm curious about that, too.
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B
Yeah. Well, this also makes me think of Russell Barclay's paper a while back about the increased chance of death with adhd. And it's not because of the adhd. It is because of the choices that we make with unmanaged adhd.
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C
Yeah.
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B
That the, when you have managed adhd, that is significantly less because, yeah, if you're having impulsivity, maybe you are eating foods that, you know are going to make you feel bad and give you. Yeah, these. I, I, I don't want to be blaming the victim here kind of thing because, yeah, they're, I, I know people with IBS work very hard to not experience the symptoms.
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C
Yep.
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B
But, but it is also something where ADHD makes a lot of things hard and managing symptoms of a chronic condition is something that it is absolutely going to make harder.
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C
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And, and even, you know, if we think about it, you know, I think it's so easy to be like, well, then you should just, you should just eat better or something like that. And, and actually that is genuinely, legitimately harder with adhd. Apart from whether or not that's the case. Apart from whether or not that would actually help with ibs, which, you know, we don't know. This paper doesn't give us any real details. It's genuinely harder to eat a habit, full, healthy diet of things that are going to be good for your gut when you have ADHD because you're going to forget to eat. We forget to take medication, we forget to eat. And also you've got a lot more dopamine seeking behavior that is just a part of ADHD and a part of doing things. So yeah, it would, it would be, it wouldn't be surprising if our, if our eating patterns look different. And I would be curious to know what that does to your microbiome. And then of course I would also be curious to just know, you know, there's other things like with adhd, hypermobility or things like that. It's like, is it, is there more sensitivity or do we just have more sensitivity naturally as well?
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B
Yeah, that's, yeah, it's why so much of this is like, this is preliminary research and especially when we're looking at gut microbiome stuff. It's such a young field still.
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C
Yes.
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B
And it's mostly just like, hey, we have seen that people with dense microbiomes tend to have better health outcomes but we don't know why. We, we don't know what the bacterias are that are, you know, making those outcomes better. And you know, how we can really increase that without, you know, with defended with definitive reasons of why it's going to give you a better outcome.
- [11:57]
C
Yeah. But we do know that people with adhd, if you look at their brains and you scan their brains, look different. You know, we know that from the research. So it would be curious to have somebody take this kind of paper because at this point, you know, they've done a really good job of saying there is an association between ADHD and ibs. Like we've looked and we found that it would be interesting to have somebody take that and now do sort of the bowel version of a brain scan and see what's going on across. Across different people.
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B
Yeah, especially. Yeah. Does. Do ADHD guts look significantly different than. Yeah, ADHD guts?
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C
I would love to know.
- [12:38]
B
Yeah. And I imagine there is probably something there too because there is a very strong connection between the gut and brain that has been found. Where, you know, there's, I don't want to go deep into what I don't understand, but I have looked in and read about a number of these things and been like, oh, wow. Like there's the strongest I've heard from a scientist is being like, you could. They were like, you know, you could argue that the gut is really in charge of what you're doing instead of your brain. And I'm like, that might be a little bit much, but I can see based on what you've been talking about how you could come to that conclusion.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, that's the craziest thing. I mean, I studied neuroscience in university and the way we were described, it was, it was sort of the, the final frontier. They were like, if you want to study something that no one really knows anything about, you know, you should study the brain because we're still figuring it all out. You know, there was a period of time where they thought the white matter in your brain was just kind of useless and you could take it out. Turns out it's incredibly important and very useful and big part of communicating different pieces between your brain. And so it feels like the gut conversation and the fact that, oh like there's not just our brain, there's other parts of our body and they are communicating with each other is an extension of that conversation of this is all a very young space in many ways and we're still learning so much.
- [14:08]
B
Yeah. And if people are looking to increase their gut microbiome thing like be very cautious of people, people over promising on the Internet because a lot of there, there's a lot of money to be made in that field. And so like thing simple things you can do to improve your gut usually like are increasing fiber and you know, eating a variety of plants. You know, fermented food can often be an option here too because that has like some natural probiotics in it, you know, and there's always the like limiting of highly processed foods, which I know is they are fantastic when you don't know what you want to eat and you're just, I need to eat something. But. And I think that's like a really important conversation here too. With like ADHD is like we can often come to this idea that we need to be doing all these things to improve our health. And oftentimes it's like, let's slow down and like make sure we're taking care of the basics and not taking care of the advanced stuff. If you can master like all the things that are going to be, you know, your big movers on your adhd, it's going to be a lot more important than doing the stuff that, hey, that Might help you some, but it's. Don't make that be the gold star that you're trying to get. And so, like, a lot of people will be like, oh, mastering gut microbiome. We don't have enough science to say that's the gold star that's going to solve everything, so don't focus on that being the number one thing you want to do.
- [15:37]
C
Yeah. I often talk with clients, actually about this idea of the house of cards versus the dominoes. Often with adhd, we can get really into something and we can build a house of cards. We're like, I'm going to fix this and this, and I'm going to get this expert and this expert, and I'm also going to start meditating while we're at it. And da, da, da, da, da. And as long as nothing changes, this house of cards should stay exactly where it is. And then, of course, life happens. We happen to life, and then everything falls down again. And so instead, we want to think about it like a domino. Like, where you are right now, if you're having this conversation, you're like, this is a struggle for me. What is the first domino that you can do? Whether it's reaching out to somebody who knows what they're doing or a diet shift or something like that. What is the first thing that you can change that would make everything easier? The next thing easier. Make the next thing easier and kind of doing it in that sequence instead.
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B
Yeah. Because, you know, Dom, one domino could knock over a bigger domino, which impact. Knock over a bigger domino.
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C
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [16:34]
B
And start small and start with things that are more practical for your life. Don't start with the things that seem like, oh, like, that sounds like a. That sounds. It's the dopamine that's calling you. Being like, that looks really cool. I haven't tried that before. And I sat. I want to do that one.
- [16:51]
C
Yeah. 100%. And. And if you are curious, yes, there is an association between ADHD and ibs. Like, this study confirms it. And you can feel free to share that one with everybody, you know, if you want to.
- [17:08]
B
And if you are having gut problems regularly and you didn't know why, maybe talk to your doctor about it. I might be doing that myself because I'm like, oh, yeah, maybe I don't need to take Gasex four or five times a week.
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C
Foreign. You were just listening to a research recap. I'm Skye Waterson of Unconventional Organization. If you like that, there's lots more information about ADHD and support for you@unconventional organization.com you can go ahead and check that out. Lots of free resources, lots of strategies. And if you want to join our programs, you can do that as well. And we'll see you there. Unconventional Organization Foreign.
- [17:56]
A
Deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T mobile is in US cellular stores. Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits. Plan features in Texas and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.