(ORDO NEWS) — A UK study found that people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are significantly more likely to be hoarders than those who do not.
Everyone in their life must have encountered a manifestation of painful hoarding, getting into apartments in which sometimes there is no place even for passage or one of the rooms is literally littered with rubbish.
And if I didn’t come across it, then I definitely saw this in films and photographs, or heard about the character of Dead Souls – the landowner Plyushkin. By the way, people who “save” animals in their apartment are also referred to as suffering from such a syndrome .
The US National Research Commission on Chronic Disorders even developed a scale from one to five that characterizes the level of pathological hoarding. The first implies free access to doors and stairs, relatively moderate disorder, safe living conditions.
With the latter, there are obvious damages to the dwelling (destruction of the walls), there is no electricity and water supply (if we are talking about a private house), and the kitchen or bathroom cannot be used due to clutter, so the inhabitants prefer to sleep outside the house – in the yard, car or garage.
Subject to this disorder, which is also called syllogomania, they believe that their behavior is normal, and, unlike others, see no reason for concern. Often, a tendency to pathological hoarding manifests itself after serious life shocks: a divorce, a serious illness, or the death of a loved one whose things they are trying to save.
People with obsessive-compulsive disorder are also prone to similar behavior. Scientists from the universities of England Ruskin and Cambridge (UK) have discovered another factor contributing to the development of syllogomania – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The disease develops in early adulthood, but previous studies focusing on it have focused on older women. The new work included 88 participants with ADHD of both sexes and different ages (excluding children).
Scientists found that 19 percent of people showed clinically significant symptoms of pathological hoarding. Their average age was 30 years, and the gender division was approximately equal.
At the same time, the remaining 81 percent of the participants also showed signs of syllogomania, but in a mild form, in which their life deteriorated slightly. Meanwhile, in the control group of volunteers (90 people), a painful tendency to hoarding was revealed in only two percent.
Finally, the researchers tested their results on a larger sample of 220 UK residents. The result turned out to be almost the same: only three percent of the respondents showed symptoms of Plushkin’s syndrome. Therefore, the authors of the work believe that ADHD is probably very conducive to the development of syllogomania.
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