Underlying Causes of ADHD Revealed

October 31, 2023

In this podcast video and transcription, Dr. Steven Hotze and Jason Gourlas, MPAS, PA-C discuss the underlying causes of ADHD and our new ADHD/Brain Support Treatment Program at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. If you or your loved one suffers from ADHD, you don’t want to miss this!

Podcast Highlights:

1:41: ADHD is, as Dr. Hotze mentioned, a medical disorder or a syndrome, and it’s affected by several environmental factors or neurologic factors, nutritional factors…hormonal and genetic factors, and it’s really an imbalanced brain that manifests as imbalanced behavior.

2:24: Those factors that we believe are most contributory are nutritional deficiencies, toxicities.

2:59: We know that children who live in cities have a much higher prevalence of developing ADHD than children who live in the country.

3:31: You also think about vaccinations. There’s a variety of different chemicals that are in vaccines – preservatives. There’s adjuvants that are supposed to incite the immune system, and we know that an incited immune system is one that generates inflammation.      

3:47: Underlying all chronic diseases, inflammation is one of the major issues there.

4:08: Some of the toxicities can be seemingly as innocuous as sugar. So sugar in greater quantities has been associated with ADHD.

4:28: And there’s a profound connection between the gut and the brain, a bidirectional communication. It’s actually been said that there’s more information that comes from your gut to your brain than from your brain to your gut.

5:34: And the other toxin that people don’t necessarily think of as a toxin is the time spent on screens, television, computers, gaming.

7:34:  You’ve got all kinds of protein-based products in these vaccines. They’re called adjuvants too, like thimerosal, which is a type of mercury, but some of them even have aluminum in it and these sort of things.

7:49: They’re supposed to stimulate the immune system to make more antibodies, but these are all transmitted across the blood brain barrier, and they get into the brain and they can have adverse effects on brain function.

8:15: …I think it was 1980, so that would give us about 40 years ago, 1 in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 children would be diagnosed with autism. Currently, now it’s 1 in 36 children are diagnosed with autism.

10:00: Statistically, we know that there’s a direct correlation between the increased number of injections as far as vaccines and autism.

11:11: …there is no autism in the Amish community. The Amish community doesn’t go to conventional doctors and they don’t take any vaccines. There’s no documented Amish child with autism that is unvaccinated.

13:26: About 40 to 60% of children that have ADHD will retain that diagnosis into adulthood. And as you were speaking, as we get older, we tend to have lower amounts of hormones.

13:40: Predominantly, hypothyroidism is a big issue when you talk about thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone is very important for energy production and metabolism, and the brain is one of the most high-energy use organs out there.

17:27: And of course, we know that the hormones have a significant impact on your brain function and your neurotransmitters.

Podcast Transcription:

Dr. Steven Hotze: Welcome. I’m Dr. Steve Hotze, and welcome to today’s program. I have with me our physician’s assistant, Jason Gourlas here, who’s an associate and colleague of mine and our other practitioners here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. We want to discuss with you a syndrome that has, over the last 20 years, been amplified and used really as a catch-all for a number of different underlying disorders, and this is ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, or it’s also known as ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Now, mind you, that is oftentimes used as the diagnosis, but in reality, that just tells you what the symptoms are. A diagnosis tells you the underlying cause of a syndrome or a symptom. So if a person has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, there’s an underlying cause of that, and that’s what we want to visit with you today about these underlying causes that can lead people to not be able to function at optimal levels, either as children or young adults or as adults.

So Jason, tell us about ADD and your take on ADHD.

Jason Gourlas: So ADHD is, as Dr. Hotze mentioned, a medical disorder or a syndrome, and it’s affected by several environmental factors or neurologic factors, nutritional factors and…

Dr. Steven Hotze: …and hormonal factors.

Jason Gourlas: …hormonal and genetic factors, and it’s really an imbalanced brain that manifests as imbalanced behavior. So that behavior predominantly comes in a couple different types, or three different types, to be precise. There’s predominantly inattentive ADHD, there’s hyperactive ADHD, and there’s a mixed type of ADHD. Those factors that we believe are most contributory are nutritional deficiencies, toxicities.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Let’s mention the toxicities. When you say toxicities, what type of toxicities could cause people to have hyperactivity or inability to focus or concentrate?

Jason Gourlas: When you think about environmental toxins, predominantly we’re talking about environmental pollution. We know that children who live in cities have a much higher prevalence of developing ADHD than children who live in the country. There’s a variety of factors at play there. But also people are very familiar with the endocrine disruptor toxin that’s in plastics, BPA. So children who have the highest levels of BPA in their blood have about four times the incidence of ADHD than other children.

Dr. Steven Hotze: And you would get that from drinking water out of plastic or drinking soda water out of plastic bottles.

Jason Gourlas: Correct. You also think about vaccinations. There’s a variety of different chemicals that are in vaccines – preservatives. There’s adjuvants that are supposed to incite the immune system, and we know that an incited immune system is one that generates inflammation. Underlying all chronic diseases, inflammation is one of the major issues there. And then we’re also talking about herbicides, pesticides, fungicides that cause imbalance in the microbiota, in the gastrointestinal tract. We’ve all heard of probiotics and things like that.

Some of the toxicities can be seemingly as innocuous as sugar. So sugar in greater quantities has been associated with ADHD. And not only that, but we know that sugar feeds Candida, which is an overgrowth of yeast and or fungus in our gastrointestinal tract, which generates inflammation. And there’s a profound connection between the gut and the brain, a bidirectional communication. It’s actually been said that there’s more information that comes from your gut to your brain than from your brain to your gut.

Dr. Steven Hotze: That’s where we have the old expression, “I’ve got a gut feeling.” Have you heard that?

Jason Gourlas: I have.

Dr. Steven Hotze: And it’s funny that people have said that for years, not really realizing and not knowing what we know now, that a tremendous amount, in fact, I think 90% of the serotonin is made in your gut by the bacteria.

Jason Gourlas: That’s correct.

Dr. Steven Hotze: That’s considered a brain neurotransmitter, but it’s made in the gut. So if you’ve ever had that gut feeling, or as you women may say, a woman’s intuition, that’s happening right here in the gut because it’s producing these neurotransmitters in your gut that affect the way you behave.

Jason Gourlas: One of the other things that people don’t necessarily think about is…

Dr. Steven Hotze: Excuse me, that’s why…have you ever heard somebody…I used to have a lady that worked there. She used to say, “I’m just hangry.”

Jason Gourlas: Oh yeah.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Not hungry, hangry. When she didn’t get the proper food, she was angry. She had anger.

Jason Gourlas: Correct. And the other toxin that people don’t necessarily think of as a toxin is the time spent on screens, television, computers, gaming. Those actually pollute the brain and they create an artificial environment that’s much more stimulating than the actual environment that children are supposed to be learning in and things. And one of the predominant problems with ADHD is that kids can become actually hyperfocused, but they’re hyperfocused on the things that they enjoy to the detriment of learning the things that they don’t necessarily enjoy. So when they’re constantly stimulated and then moved into an environment where they’re no longer stimulating to that same degree…

Dr. Steven Hotze: Stimulated. They can act out.

Jason Gourlas: … they can act out or have very significant problems with inattention. That has to do with that neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s not just a pleasure-seeking molecule, but it’s also a novelty. It’s a molecule involved in novelty. And if you don’t provide novelty for that person, there’s the potential that they’re just going to zone out and not pay attention. These are non-traditional thoughts about toxicity. And it’s a result in neuro atypia, which is…

Dr. Steven Hotze: And as we had talked earlier about vaccines, currently on the schedule, the CDC has for children before they reach 18 years of age or somewhere in that order and primarily as young children, they really receive somewhere on the order of 72 different vaccines in their early childhood life. And those vaccines contain toxic chemicals. They had in some cases contained mercury, thimerosal, and a number of other chemicals.

Nobody ever asked what’s in them. And you can go read the patents. You can find out. You’ve got all kinds of protein-based products in these vaccines. They’re called adjuvants too, like thimerosal, which is a type of mercury, but some of them even have aluminum in it and these sort of things. And they’re adjuvants. They’re supposed to stimulate the immune system to make more antibodies, but these are all transmitted across the blood brain barrier, and they get into the brain and they can have adverse effects on brain function.

So there was this controversy among conventional doctors and those that do natural approaches to medicine over the cause of autism 20-30 years ago, I think it was 1980, so that would give us about 40 years ago, one in somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 children would be diagnosed with autism. Currently, now it’s one in 36 children are diagnosed with autism. And autism, it’s brain disorder where children don’t function well socially in society and they have a host of problems growing up and they really have to be cared for by the parents because they don’t really function well. In the worst case, they don’t function well. But we have one in 36.

So what caused that? And I’ve seen the studies on this and it’s demonstrable, when you think of something as what has changed most since 1980 that’s affected children to cause them to have autism? Have we changed the diet in America really? Maybe we eat more junk food, but there was plenty of junk food back then. What is it? Are there more pesticides that we’re using, insecticides on the food? All of these could contribute. Could it be the injections? And of course, the pharmaceutical companies have denied it has anything to do with that because they would be personally liable. And that’s why, as a matter of fact, they have in the PREP Act, which was the act signed in 1986 by Reagan that gave the pharmaceutical companies the ability to produce these products and not be liable for any health damages they cause. So the pharmaceutical companies don’t want to get blamed for anything. Statistically, we know that there’s a direct correlation between the increased number of injections as far as vaccines and autism.

And autism is on a scale, so you can have people that maybe they have ADHD because the vaccines have adversely affected their brain development. Remember, the brain doesn’t develop until you’re about 22 years of age. So if these children are getting all these chemicals in their system in the form of vaccines, they’re getting it, what kind of adverse effect is that having all those people that don’t get autism, but maybe they’re on the scale? Somewhere down the line, it’s having an effect on them.

So I tell you that because you can’t do anything to reverse that necessarily. I mean, once you take these vaccines, it has the potential to causing serious health problems. So you really need to think long and hard about how much, how many, or if any vaccines you want to give your children. Just to give you an example of this, in the Amish community…there is no autism in the Amish community. The Amish community doesn’t go to conventional doctors and they don’t take any vaccines. There’s no documented Amish child with autism that is unvaccinated. So that tells you there. Now, I don’t know if they diagnose ADHD with these kids or not, but this may be one of the causes that we see some of the hyperactivity or the attention deficit to disorders may be due to the vaccines.

Here’s where you could find some good work on that. Go to Sherri Tenpenny, (drtenpenny.com) Dr. Sherri, S-H-E-R-R-I Tenpenny, T-E-N-P-E-N-N-Y, the way it sounds. She’s written voluminous works on that. Or you could go to Steve Kirsch, K-I-R-S-C-H, kirschsubstack.com, Steve at kirschsubstack.com, and he’s done some…he’s independently wealthy, and he has studied the Covid vaccine and now all the vaccines and has appeared before the Pennsylvania legislature to testify on the relationship between vaccines, what he’s found through his statistical studies between the vaccines and autism. We tell you that just to let you know you need to be really concerned about your children or grandchildren in what the conventional world is telling them to put into their bodies in the form of vaccines.

Jason Gourlas: I totally agree.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Anyway, we have the problem with ADHD. What else could cause it? Tell us about hormones and the effect that it could potentially have on a person’s emotional stability, their cognitive ability, their attention, their hyperactivity.

Jason Gourlas: So ADHD is not just a problem for children, but is a problem that can continue well into adulthood. About 40% to 60% of children that have ADHD will retain that diagnosis into adulthood. And as you were speaking, as we get older, we tend to have lower amounts of hormones. Predominantly, hypothyroidism is a big issue when you talk about thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone is very important for energy production and metabolism, and the brain is one of the most high-energy use organs out there. So if you’re not getting adequate blood flow to your brain, if the mitochondria aren’t being stimulated by adequate thyroid hormone, and as you’ve discussed so many times before, adequacy of thyroid hormone doesn’t necessarily manifest in lab work. It’s manifested clinically.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Clinically.

Jason Gourlas: So that’s one of the things that we address here.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Oh, let me mention something on the thyroid. One thought is in some cases of ADHD, and mind you, there could be a number of different causes. As we talked about, it could be toxic causes, it could be nutritional causes, it could be allergies. Histamine is neuroreactive. And when people secrete histamine, and that happens when people have allergy disorders, either inhaled allergies, wheat, tree grass, pollens, dust mite, mold spores, animal danders, or foods, they secrete histamine. And that affects the brain. That can cause a child or an adult to feel poorly.

In children and in adults too, it can affect their cognitive ability to focus and be attentive or it could affect them and cause them to be hyperactive. We see this particularly in little kids that have food allergies and the common foods are wheat, corn, egg, milk, yeast, and soybean. Sugar is another food that is highly inflammatory. And we know that with kids, and you do too, folks, when you give your kids too much sugar, you say, “My gosh, they’re bouncing off the walls.” So in some way that can have an adverse effect on a child’s behavior.

But in foods it can be a common food. Wheat, corn, egg, milk, yeast, and soybean are the big six. They’re in all the packaged foods, so people can easily get allergic to something if they keep repeating. If they have allergic disorder in their genes, genetically predisposed allergies, and they’re allergic to wheat, tree, grass, pollens, dust mites, mold spores, they’re also going to have some concomitant food allergies, and those foods can turn a child’s behavior on and turn it off.

We used to test children here years ago when I was strictly an allergy practice. We used to test them with various foods. We’d give them drops under their tongue of different dilution of foods, and we could literally turn on and off hyperactive behavior in a child. Then we would give the parents the neutralizing dose and they’d take that home whenever the child acted up. They could give them that neutralizing dose. So foods can cause a problem. So toxins, foods can cause a problem, vaccines can cause a problem. Hormonal deficiencies can cause a problem.

I was going to tell you, I’ve seen this before in children, I’ve read where some doctors promoted the theory that the reason children become hyperactive is because their thyroid function is so low intracellularly that they feel tired. The only way that can stay alert is to be overactive. What we’ve treated successfully in some children by giving them thyroid medication…it calmed them down, which is interesting.

So what other problems would we see with that? And of course, we know that the hormones have a significant impact on your brain function and your neurotransmitters. Particularly in women, progesterone is very profound, has a profound effect of calming the brain function. It calms things down because it stimulates the GABA system, which is gamma-aminobutyric acid, just know it is GABA. And that has a calming effect on a person’s emotional status. When we give women who are low in progesterone, who have progesterone deficiency, you give them that, it’s a Godsend. It just changes their behavior. So the hormones do have an impact on that. What else?

Jason Gourlas: Just general nutritional sufficiency. So making sure that you have adequate amount of good protein to support neurotransmitter development, macronutrients, including fat, to help with cognitive function. Most people don’t realize most of your brain is made of fat and covers your neurons, which is the wiring of your brain.

And having an adequate amount of complex carbohydrates can be beneficial, as well. So everybody’s a little bit different in their needs for those things, but that’s very important. Stabilizing blood sugar is very important for people with ADHD because it’s when you have these swings in blood sugar and they’ve done glucose tolerance testing for people with ADHD, and there was a variety of different responses, but none of them were normal.

So in order to maintain adequate energy to the brain, you have to have a balanced diet and eat in an appropriate fashion so that you don’t get hypoglycemic or low blood sugar that can then generate the production or secretion of some neurotransmitters like epinephrine or norepinephrine, which is adrenaline to some people, or noradrenaline, which then increases agitation and hyperactivity in and of itself. So that becomes very important.

And then there are some nutraceuticals that are being very beneficial. One of the other manifestations, the actual studies that have been done is looking at electroencephalograms, so measuring the brainwaves of people that have ADHD and don’t have ADHD. And they have a higher theta to beta ratio. So theta is sort of that dreamlike state or daydreaming state. And beta is the active concentration and focus. So people with ADHD have a higher amount of theta in relationship to beta. There’s some nutraceuticals that can actually change that.

One of the things that we offer here is also something called Micro Current Neurofeedback or IASIS Micro Current Neurofeedback, which helps to strengthen the beta brainwaves and make the theta brainwaves more appropriate in times where it’s more appropriate. So there’s a variety of different things that we can do from counseling people through nutrition through dealing with environmental toxicity.

The environment is the external environment, so the homes that we live in, the streets that we walk upon, but it’s also our internal environment, which is our gut microbiota and dealing with infections like Candida and things like that. Then also helping people to understand the importance of physical activity. That’s another deficiency that we have as a culture. And our children spend hours in front of not just the screens, but playing video games and things like that, but they don’t spend enough time outside using their own imagination, creating their own dopamine hits that would be much more appropriate.

We know that actually things that are disciplined, sports, disciplined activities like martial arts, have been found to be very beneficial in giving kids that structure that they need and teaching them discipline apart from, but that doesn’t absolve parents of what they’re supposed to be doing, as well.

So there’s a variety of different things, and we honor each person’s biochemical individuality, each person’s unique experiences, to tailor a program for them to help them where they are on that spectrum of neuro atypia.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, this has been a fascinating program and your insights, Jason, are just really great and I appreciate you sharing with us today.

If you have a problem where you think that you’re having some cognitive problems, whether you are not able to focus clearly, maybe you have brain fog, maybe you’re hyperactive and you can’t sit still, maybe your kids are having some problems with that. Nobody is born with an Adderall deficiency, and any drugs that would be used to treat this disorder would be the last, last thing that we would do here. It would be the last measure.

We’re going to do everything we can to try to address underlying probable causes of the ADHD syndrome, knowing that very likely by addressing either the potentials of toxicity and helping detoxify the body, replenishing hormones and foods, treating allergies, all this can have a positive effect on a person’s underlying behavioral disorders positively and help them improve.

So if you need some help, don’t hesitate to give us a call here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. The number is on the line: 281-698-8698. We’d be glad to help you. Thank you so much. God bless each one of you.

Call our Wellness Consultants for a complimentary consultation at 281-698-8698. It will be our privilege to serve you!

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Categories: ADD/ADHD, Blog, brain health, Uncategorized

Tags: add, adhd, adhd in adults, adhd treatment program at Hotze Health & Wellness Center, treatment for adhd, underlying causes of adhd

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