Functional Medicine and Diet and Clean Eating helped my son with ADHD
Total years in practice: 45
History:
My son has been diagnosed with ADHD since first grade. We went and saw several integrative doctors and through blood work found out he has an MTHFR genetic mutation. This is pretty common and there’s other Facebook pages about these SNPs but that was step one. So basically they threw methylated B vitamins at him along with some other supplements which only aggravated the situation and made him extremely hyper and did nothing to help his ADHD. Long story short, we did other testing and discovered he has a COMT++ SNP. The COMT is highly responsible for your neurotransmitter balance, as well as MTHFR. Due to COMT, my son can’t handle any methyl groups. That means no methylcobalamin (b12) nor methyl folate.
therapy:
I’ve gone through a ton of things and I STRONGLY recommend you do some testing so you’re not spinning your wheels. Not all supplements are effective on all kiddos because of genetic SNPs. We finally found a Doctor Who did a nutreval through Genova and we could see black-and-white what nutrients he was deficient in and target those as well as looking into any toxicity or food allergies. With COMT it is recommended to do hydroxy or a adeno b12 vs methyl. I also would recommend looking at the book healing without hurting. Every kid is different biologically and although there are a million wonderful suggestions in terms of supplementation I would do blood work before I started piling those types of things on. Diet and clean eating is 100% effective however finding out and pinpointing if there’s any nutritional deficiencies, leaky gut, toxicity going on in your child’s body is key. Just my 2 cents.
