Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi,
I was wondering if there are any animals that could be used as model organisms for ADHD. In my project I wanted to see if certain foods increased the hyperactivity of children with ADHD. Upon researching I found there are mice and rats that could be used for model organisms but are specific types. Here is the article I referenced: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1180819/
I was wondering if you could use any of these animals for a high school science fair project that would comply with ISEF rules and where you could even get them. I also wanted to know if the generic mouse found at a pet store could be a good model for hyperactivity. Thank you for your help.

Hello,
I read the abstract of the article in your posting and it refers to a particular genetically modified strain of animal, probably a mouse—but not the pet shop variety. These animal ‘models’ of human disease are produced by scientists in order to do experiments that would be difficult, unethical or impossible on humans.

Your idea of testing the effects of different types of food on ADHD is very good, but unless you can find a research lab that is using rodent models of ADHD and a mentor who will work with you to develop your project, this is going to be exceedingly difficult.

I would suggest that you consider doing some surveys/questionnaires with volunteers to test your hypothesis about a link between certain foods and attention deficit. Read the information about working with human subjects: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ects.shtml

Trying to recruit a large enough number of individuals diagnosed with ADHD would require lots of safeguards of privacy and a lot of time, so my recommendation would be to choose healthy persons for your questionnaire. You might make a list of five foods that you hypothesize are affecting attention and ask people if they eat them and how often. I don’t know how many people you would need to participate, but you would have to screen them first to get groups who did or did not eat the foods.

The problem then becomes how to measure and quantitate their ‘attention’ ability. My first thought was to have the subjects do the free games on Lumosity because they require careful attention to make a good score, but I imagine any video game that requires focus and concentration would do. You just need a way of getting a numerical measure of a person’s attention ability over time.

I did a search for ADHD science fair projects and found this abstract:

http://www.fair.mnacadsci.org/sfReports ... 20Symptoms

The abstract does not offer much detail on how the data were gathered, but it does give you some information on the type of statistical tests you would have to use to prove or disprove correlation with a certain type of food.

This is a really great question but a tough one to answer. Keep posting to Scibuddies and we will work with you on developing this into a workable project.

Best wishes,

SciB

Thank you so much for your help. I decided to go a different direction. I am wanting to test the effects of food dyes on the DNA of fruit flies. I want to test the effects of combinations of food dyes because most processed foods now contain a combination. However, I can't find anywhere that talks of popular food coloring combinations within foods. I was wondering if anyone would either be able to help me find this information or if you could suggest where I could obtain this information. Thank you so much

I'm not sure where you can find a list of common combinations of colors in foods, but I did find a list of the color additives that are approved for use from the FDA, along with what they might be listed as on an ingredients label. There are only 9 approved color additives (this does not include natural additives that don't require approval), so you could come up with some combinations on your own, or you could survey food labels and see what combinations are listed.
Here is the link I used:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPack ... .htm#types