Ashley Ang

So I had started off as kind of almost this in-home aide, working with a young girl who was at the very beginning of puberty. And she was experiencing a lot of symptoms of ADHD, as well as anxiety, depression, and some behavioral problems.

And as I was working with her over a couple years, I noticed that as she was going through puberty, everything just kind of got worse, despite having a psychiatrist, me in the home helping her get off to school, the parents being very involved. Things just seemed to keep getting worse, despite all of the care that she was receiving.

And so with that, I really wanted to study when I was looking at PhD programs was what is going on during this time period around puberty that just seems to be making everything worse.

And I, during my interview, had proposed, have you thought about looking this in adolescence? So it was the perfect combination of I'd be able to help her with her research and she'd be able to help me learn how to do this research. and learn how to look at this in adolescence.

Broadly, we found that ADHD symptoms are changing across the menstrual cycle. We also saw some connections with different hormones.

We are seeing that for these young adult females, we're seeing very similar changes of hormones impacting ADHD symptoms. We're also thinking that there's other reproductive life events like pregnancy, perimenopause, that might also be experiencing these changes around ADHD symptoms.

Now there's many different kinds of birth control, where some stabilize hormone levels, others continue to have changes in hormone levels. There's different hormones involved in each one, so it's a very complicated process. But the thought is that if we're able to stabilize these shifts in hormones, we might be able to stabilize those ADHD symptoms.

Yes, I think that is definitely where we're at right now, where there's just this overwhelming need for more research in this area.

I'd be happy that if in 15 years this was something that physicians even knew about, that they were talking about with their patients, that this is something that they might be experiencing. So if we can get to that point and researchers have moved on to interventions, I think that that would be an okay place for us to be.

It's kind of a slow-moving process, but that is kind of the realistics of research.

I think overall it is a criteria that might need some flexibility. I think 12 is a very arbitrary number, and so that could be something that's updated in the future.