Health Care Articles: > Description: Articles on health care topics from Ingenix Consulting.
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ADD vs Anxiety/OCD
...when a person has problems with anxiety, they shift their attention and other mental resources to the things they are worried about. This is actually a natural part of the fight-flight response (it is adaptive for someone in a threatening situation to focus on the perceived danger—not doing so could be deadly!). But one side effect of this is that it can effect memory, concentration, and other cognitive mental/processes involving non threat-related situations (e.g., remembering peoples’ names, etc.)
We know from research that people with OCD pay heightened attention to the things they obsess about. But as a result, their attention, memory, and other mental resources may be drained, resulting in problems like easily distractible, loses or misplaces things,disorganized,reads and not know what was read, trouble retaining information, forgetful of names, procrastinates, feels like an underachiever, several projects at the same time, when working on one project, gets distracted to others full of ideas, interrupts during conversations so doesn't forget what wants to say poor follow through...
That said, ADD is certainly a real disorder; but when attentional, memory, and concentration difficulties are observed in the context of a comorbid anxiety disorder (especially in adults), it is important to use caution before deciding that this is truly ADD. It could be a natural byproduct of the anxiety problem.
In the news..
Solving Fear and Anxiety: Joseph E. LeDoux, Center for Neural Science, New York University, discusses the mechanisms of learned avoidance. while some fears are innate, it's not the trauma, it's the interaction between the traumatic event and the individual's brain. Can we control inappropriate or excess fear? What are the biological elements that convert short-term memory to long-term memory? Can they be harnessed to help in combatting fear? click here
Dr Leahy ABCT presidential address at abct NY NY 2009 click here
The Beck institute Newsletter click here
Re: Swine flu vaccination (or other vaccinations). Medical staff at Weill-Cornell/ New York Presbyterian have suggested the following website click here
Dr Leahy was interviewed by Jane Pauley on WebMD TV on bipolar disorder. You can see this by going to