LAPSE: Is the ADHD brain a sleepy brain?

The causal relationship between sleep disturbances and ADHD symptoms has not yet been established despite the fact that, in the healthy population, sleep loss is often associated with behavioural and experiential changes similar to those observed in the ADHD population.
This 3-year project leverages recent discoveries in sleep research to undercover the relationship between sleepiness and attentional deficits in ADHD. Our central hypothesis is that local sleep during the day (i.e. the fact that some brain regions can exhibit sleep-like activity within a globally awake brain) can account for ADHD symptoms.
Demonstrating that ADHD symptoms are mechanistically linked to local sleep during the day would dramatically reshape how ADHD is currently interpreted. By suggesting a central role for sleep disturbances in the aetiology of ADHD, this proposal could help reassess the costs/benefits of pharmacological treatments of ADHD and propose novel complementary therapeutical approaches focusing on sleep.