Hi, today we're going to talk about genetics. We talked a little bit about it last week, and that it can play quite a large role in the pathology of ADHD for some people. I think, particularly when someone has a childhood diagnosis, I think there's more likely to be more genetics involved than potentially if you receive an adult diagnosis. If we think about these pathways that we've been talking about all week, and kind of think of them as rivers, as we get older and go through life, we're exposed to lots of environmental toxins with plastics and pollution. And we ride on aeroplanes, and have radiation exposure and have late nights and eat really badly for a few years while we're at university and, you know, probably drink too much all these different things and life stresses can can kind of affect these river pathways, they're kind of either little bit by bit blocking up the rivers with kind of all these toxins, or maybe we're just not having those nutrients as much and kind of not feeding the path of the rivers. So we're kind of the, they're running a bit low, maybe the rivers. And so that's why we can maybe have a problem with some of these pathways, which is why we've been talking about all these issues for the last two weeks really working on the basics, we need to look at those foundations before we can then kind of then leap into genetics. But then for a child, I think they haven't had that time the same as the adults to kind of build up all these these impeding things to their rivers, they've not had the time to kind of have the lack of nutrients, or potentially all the toxic exposure that we're just all exposed to through life. So I think in that situation, then they're more likely to be maybe some slightly larger genetic effects happening.There are a lot of different genetic companies out there offering lots of different things. It can be really interesting to find out about your ancestry and kind of all those that information. I think with some of them, there's so much information, that it can be a bit overwhelming. And if you can't do anything about the gene, I don't think there's any reason to worry about it. I don't I don't think that's particularly helpful, maybe. Whereas I use a company called LiveCode GX, and they look at nutrigenomics. They look at all the genes that we can have an effect on through nutrition and lifestyle. So anything that's reported is something that we can actually do something about. So I find, I find that much more empowering and more helpful to understand and to know that there's always going to be something that can be done about it, to understand how you can support yourself.So what are we talking about with genetics, people often refer to snips single nucleotide polymorphisms, which basically means it's just a little variation. So there's the normal normal setup for the gene, the normal design, and there's just a very slight variation that might or might not have an effect. There's an awful lot of snips that have been identified, that don't have an effect at all. So the ones that we look at are the ones that there has been research into and investigation as to if there would be would be some sort of difference with that snip. You can think about the genes as, as almost instruction manuals or recipes, so, the recipe for our dopamine, we have lots of genes in that step to make our dopamine of: we need to add this molecule, we need to take away this molecule, we need to add this cofactor of vitamin C, and it has this instruction mechanism. That's what our genes are coding for to have these instructions to create everything that we need to create in our bodies, which is why there's so so many instructions and so many genes. So the ones that have been researched quite heavily are to do with the methylation cycle in our bodies. Methylation is a process of just adding a methyl group or taking away a methyl group or just a molecule. But it's a very powerful mechanism that's used everywhere in our whole bodies in every cell. It's used in cell health, and it's used in energy. It's used to do detoxification, and it's also really essential, methylation, for making and recycling neurotransmitters which is why it's particularly of interest to us with ADHD.So you can think of the methylation cycle, like a child's cog toys are those with all the different cogs, interlocking, and you turn one cog and all the other cogs turn. And that's very much what's happening that there's a lot of interconnected reactions. And two areas that are specifically interested for us for ADHD is the folate cycle, and the BH four cycle, we've already talked about BH for for for making those neurotransmitters. And folate we've talked about last week a lot with our dark green leafy veg, and our radishes and our watercress and things like that. So when we eat our folate, it needs to go through several steps to be converted to the form of folate that we actually use in our BH four cycle to make that dopamine that we've been talking about. So to go through each of those steps, takes some genes a gene at each of those steps to kind of go this is what needs doing. This is the next step. This is the next step. So you can imagine that we're there's a lot of research into those genes in the folate cycle and combinations of those genes to try and identify if there's any connection to ADHD. Now we can think about these snips, these variations on the genes on the instructions, as either a slowing down or speeding up. You could think about it as a conveyor belt in a production line in a factory. And that, if that conveyor belt is running too fast, we're gonna pile up all the all the buns at the end ready, there's too fast for the next step to kind of do the packaging. Or if it's running too slow, then the next step's waiting to do the packaging, and the buns are just not coming through fast enough ready to do what's needed. So if there are snips on these steps in the folate pathway that we've been talking about either speeding things up or slowing things down, that can then have an effect on the amount of folate that's being fed into the BH four to be used in the production of dopamine. Now, at the end of the dopamine pathway, we've talked about the dopamine being recycled. And that's done by a couple of genes, one of them's called the comt gene. And that does the recycling, and there can be snips on that gene, too. Sometimes it's slow, and sometimes it can be fast. So we could see that perhaps having a fast comt kind of getting rid of doing the recycling quicker than normal, could maybe reduce that pool of dopamine that's available and kind of it's turning on the tap again, that we've been talking about. Now, just because a person might have snips on the pathway, say the folate, again, for the example we've been talking about, they might have snips that are slowing things down. But if everything's slow down, and the contrary, cycling is also slower than everything's still in balance. Whereas you could see that if perhaps the folate slightly slowed down, but the comt gene is actually upregulated, and actually going faster, then that could mean a depletion, because you're not feeding our pool of dopamine as fast as we might like, but we're also recycling it faster than we might like, which might lead to a deficit in the middle and why genes can play such a large role in ADHD. There are many other snips that are also been implicated in ADHD, but it's about the balance of the effect of the genes not whether they're slow or whether they're fast. So it's always best to work with a registered practitioner to really understand how it's applicable for you.