My ADD husband is required by insurance to have bloodwork done every year in accordance with his physical. Because he has been changed to a new doctor both for primary care and for his ADD, the new doctor required new bloodwork & he added a special request to check for a Vitamin D deficiency (something apparently not part of the routine screening). His Vitamin D is EXTREMELY depleted...so much so that we got a call that he is being rushed 2 Vitamin D prescriptions-- 1 enormous pill to be taken only 1x per week and another dosage to be taken daily.
I've been reading a lot about Vitamin D deficiencies, which this doctor says often go hand in hand with ADD and is part of why many with ADD also have seasonal affective disorder. My husband has been experiencing a lot of flulike aches and just a general *blah* feeling that he hasn't been able to attribute to any source. The doctor immediately zeroed in on a possible lack of Vitamin D as a cause (something that has never been suggested to us by anyone before) and it sounds like he was right.
My mother has fibromyalgia and I've even read that with mega doses of Vitamin D sometimes the symptoms and pain disappear. She is going to ask her doctor about it at her next checkup.
Now my husband works mainly nights, likes the drapes pulled at home because sunlight bothers his eyes & he hates the glare on the TV, and drinks NO milk whatsoever. I am sure he is higher risk for Vitamin D deficiency than most, but on the off chance that it could make a difference--especially at this time of the year--it could be a really easy to check and easy to fix factor in an ADD person not feeling well.
Quick addition...
Submitted by Aspen on
Even after changing his Aderall doseage at his last appt, we just haven't felt like his meds have been working all that well for him lately. He has been gung ho mentally to work on his ADD since the conference back in Oct, but his ability to focus on working on it has been all over the map.
The doctor has assured him that his Vitamin D levels should be up enough for him to tell a difference within 2 weeks and that his meds will likely be working much better also! We are feeling encouraged as we just have had no answer for why things have seemed so difficult for him lately.
vitamin D and ADD/SAD
Submitted by arwen on
Aspen, I've done a fair amount of investigation on this in the past because of my ADD-spouse's SAD. Vitamin D definitely can be a factor for both ADD and SAD, at least in part because of its impact on serotonin.
My husband's father, who also has ADD and SAD, moved way south many years ago, and the impact on both disorders was huge. We've also noticed that when we go way south for a week or two of vacation in the middle of winter, and he gets a big jolt of vitamin D, my husband's behavior gets much more erratic, like his spring behavior, very impulsive and irritable.
Although my husband has tried taking vitamin D supplements, they have not been much help. He does take a multivitamin, and it does make a difference (he has less energy when he runs out!). You should be aware that there are a couple of different forms of vitamin D. D2 is the kind used to fortify milk; D3 is the kind your body makes when exposed to UV light. There is some disagreement among professionals whether the kind of vitamin D makes any difference to your body's ability to use it. I don't know what kind of vitamin D supplement my husband tried, it may have been a D2 -- certainly, increasing his milk intake has no effect.
One of the most important things my husband does to address his SAD is to use a special 10,000 lux lamp. This is much brighter than most lamps you can buy, even many of those that supposedly help with mood. It includes UV light, which helps his body make more vitamin D (D3, which does seem to help his ADD and SAD). In addition, it provides the bright light that recent research says is important in regulating the body's "time clock". He starts using this when fall starts, for short periods of time in the morning, and gradually increasing 5 minutes per week as the days shorten. Since the maximum recommended time to use the lamp in one stretch is about 45 minutes, in November he starts adding time in the evening. He hits the max in early January and then starts tapering back down in a reverse process. The difference this has made in both his SAD and ADD is really significant.
The other thing that my husband does is to take Wellbutrin for his SAD symptoms -- again, in a gradually increasing and then gradually decreasing pattern. This has also been a big help.
These two tools together constitute a small miracle for us in dealing with my husband's ADD during his SAD season. Based on our experience, I would say it makes a lot of sense for somebody with either ADD or SAD to have their vitamin D levels checked. If they turn out to be seriously deficient, either of these therapies could be considered as part of a treatment program. But I'm not sure how much value the dairy products would have.
Thanks for adding your experience!
Submitted by Aspen on
Arwen, did I understand correctly that when your husband gets jolt of Vitamin D that it is actually a negative for him behavior-wise? That he gets irritable and impulsive?? I had thought his spring like behavior was an improvement over the winter's SAD symptoms.
I'm not real sure either as far as the dairy products, but I know that my husband was careful to drink several glasses of milk a day as well as take a 5000 IU (D3)supplement daily until his prescriptions arrived--which only happened yesterday.
His weekly pill is 50000 IUs (D2)!!! and his daily pill is 1000 IUs (D3). He'd already taken the 5000 IU supplement when the prescriptions arrived at our home, so today is his first day on the prescription while we've been aware of the Vitamin D deficiency for about a week. Just the milk and supplement we picked up at the store did appear to make a noticable difference, though my husband has never experienced any SAD type behaviors that either of us have noticed.
His doctor really thinks his problem has been cauesd by the terrible weather we've had here over the last couple months....vast majority of days rainy and overcast....his avoidance of the sun on days when he is home because he hates the glare off anything, and his lack of milk drinking. Whether he is correct or not as to the cause, I am not sure; but it has made a big difference in his body aches and general *blah* feeling. Which he does get the blahs without any reason that he can pinpoint every couple months--we think this occurs year round though we really haven't tracked it much. We are going to start tracking all these things better now...so many things affect our bodies since the systems are so interconnected.
Plus so far no amount of begging will induce him to cut out his Coke/DrPepper habit. I know that is just terrible for his health and symptoms. Maybe someday--if he thinks the idea is his own :)
that jolt of vitamin D
Submitted by arwen on
Aspen, I'm sorry if I haven't been clear about the impacts of my husband's SAD behaviors. Fall, winter and spring are *all* problems when his SAD is untreated or undertreated -- but in different ways. In the fall, as he is trending towards the SAD behaviors, he becomes more and more forgetful -- things he remembered to take care of just fine, without reminders, in September, begin to need reminders and eventually aren't remembered even *with* reminders. And he has more and more trouble as the fall progresses with following the thread of a conversation. In winter he becomes lethargic and pretty nearly completely uncommunicative, and very "spacey" -- his mind is constantly somewhere other than where it should be and is quite sluggish. In spring, as his system is being restimulated with vitamin D, he becomes very volatile -- one day he'll be mentally bouncing off the walls and the next be fairly placid -- so he becomes impulsive and if his impulses are interrupted or thwarted, extremely irritable. (Spring is actually when he is hardest to deal with -- in the fall and winter, he *can't* listen well, which I can cope with, but in the spring he just doesn't *want* to listen, and that has sometimes led to a *lot* of trouble and is much harder to deal with. He feels the return of energy, but doesn't yet possess the mental discipline to harness it and use it appropriately, so he ends up like a kid on a sugar-high off and on.) Summer is the only "good" season, because by then he has gotten the hang of curbing his impulsiveness, he's communicating well, he's remembering well, and he has energy for all kinds of worthy things.
(I should mention that this year, with his meds and lamp therapy tweaked to what we think is optimal based on past years' experiences, we are having an amazingly good SAD season!)
So, yes, a *jolt* of vitamin D, in the middle of winter, makes him behave worse -- because he doesn't stop taking his Wellbutrin during this time (and should not -- Wellbutrin is a drug that should not be stopped abruptly, there can be serious adverse impacts if you do). So, in effect, his system is getting a very large overload of serotonin during a midwinter vacation way south. His Wellbutrin and lamp therapy are intended to try to create the same kind of serotonin levels he would naturally experience without them in, say, August. If we went to Miami, he wouldn't have the 10,000 lux of the lamp while on vacation, but instead he'd have about 75,000 lux of the sun, and for a longer period of the day. This is enough to kick his neurotransmitters into spring levels, but unfortunately not all the way to summer levels. Furthermore, this is an abrupt change that has abrupt consequences. It would be different if we slowly migrated south over a period of weeks and stayed there for the duration of the winter.
You must live in the same general neck of the woods that I do, since you describe the same lousy weather we've had where I live. Fortunately, my husband hasn't been too affected by it, since he spends most of his days indoors in a cubicle away from windows anyway. When he has experienced some of these "blahs" and not feeling as well as he'd like from bouts of prolonged bad weather, he tries to get more exercise and that really does help. A few years ago, we invested in a home recumbent bike machine and it has really been worthwhile in this regard, since it does not require good weather or a drive to a distant location. (These do not have to cost an arm and a leg -- people buy them and use them half a dozen times and decide they don't want it after all, so there is a fair market in very gently used exercise equipment. The national chain "Play It Again Sports" often has good deals on gently used machines, it's how we got ours.)
I really do urge you to try to track your spouse's vitamin D intake along with his behaviors and his own sense of well-being. I would also suggest you consider his magnesium levels. Recent studies have indicated a correlation between low magnesium and ADHD in children, and there's no special reason to think that this wouldn't also apply to adults. (I don't have any personal experience to offer on this score -- my husband and I have been taking magnesium supplements for many years for other reasons, so I have no personal data of "with" and "without" it.)
Let me also add a caution -- as I'm sure you're aware, there are different subtypes of ADD. Personally, I'm convinced that while all those with ADD have certain biological characteristics in common, those in different subtypes have differences in biological characteristics. I have read, for example, that ADDers without hyperactivity tend to have a significantly higher incidence of SAD than those with hyperactivity. Maybe that means that light therapy could be beneficial to those without hyperactivity and not to those with it. It may be that your spouse's subtype of ADD does get benefit from milk products but my spouse's subtype does not. That's why it's so important to track these kinds of things yourself if you possibly can, to find out what your particular spouse's cause-and-effect tendencies are. My experiences may point you in a general direction, or suggest some general type of biological mechanisms at work, but only your own direct observations of your spouse can give you the data you need to see any possible patterns in his physiological condition and his ADD.
Good luck!