Can ADHD be diagnosed with a brain spect scan?

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Not yet. At this point, researchers have identified certain neuronal pathways that tend to be abnormally active or inactive in individuals with ADHD, but there's not enough information yet to use it to make a diagnosis. For example, researchers have determined that patients with ADHD typically have abnormally high levels of dopamine in their brain, and that certain medications used to treat ADHD decrease dopamine activity to normal levels. However, this doesn't establish a causal link. It might be that ADHD is caused, in part or entirely, by overacitivity of the domapinergic pathways and reducing this activity is what prevents ADHD symptoms. It could also be that this overacitivity is an effect of ADHD that is not causing the symptoms. In either case, this would provide a useful diagnostic tool. However, it could also be that the domapine activity is entirely unrelated to the ADHD symptoms, and it's just that whatever gene causes the ADHD symptoms is often linked to one that causes overproduction of dopamine. In that case, a dopamine scan might accurate diagnose a majority of ADHD patients, but a patient could have excessive dopamine activity without having ADHD, or ADHD without excessive dopamine activity, so some cases would be misdiagnosed.

The point is that ADHD is caused by some abnormality or group of abnormalities in the brain, and eventually we'll be able to test for one or more of those characteristic abnormalities to make the diagnosis on a neurological basis, but first we have to conclusively identify pathways that are characteristic of the disorder, and we're simply not there yet.

At this point, the diagnosis of ADHD is still purely clinical. It's based on a description of symptoms, the results of various forms of cognitive testing, and often observation of classroom behavior in school age children. Treating ADHD is largely a matter of trial and error. Doctors prescribe one medication after another until the find one that alleviates the symptoms without causing too many side effects. Part of the reason for that is that each patient's brain chemistry is different, and there are most likely several different physiological causes of ADHD, and at this point there's no way to accurately predict which medication will be most likely to help a particular patient.

technically it could, but itd be far more cost efficient to just do the written tests and meet with a therapist

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Can ADHD be diagnosed with a brain spect scan?

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