Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

McCord, Elzie

Keywords

ADHD, Neurobiology, History

Area of Concentration

Neurobiology

Abstract

This paper seeks not only to analyze the current neurobiological concepts of attention deficit disorder, but to examine the disorder from a historical perspective and to study its development. The historical review begins with Hippocrates and studies its evolution of the disorder throughout the 20th century, including early neurobiological theories such as minimal brain damage/dysfunction and the catecholamine hypothesis. Through studying the history, it seems that some but not all of the behavioral disorders observed could have been fact attention deficit disorder. Due to the complexity and diversity of the symptoms of attention deficit disorder, symptoms closer to the genetic etiology of the disorder, or endophenotypes, have been studied. In addition, functional and structural imaging suggest a dysfunction of the frontal-striatal and fronto-cerebellar networks may be key in the pathology of this disoder. Neurochemical models based on evidence from clinical and animal studies support this idea and implicate actions of norepinephrine on α2A receptors in the prefrontal cortex and dopamine in the striatum, possibly based on dysfunctions of transporters of these catelcholamines.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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