Leiann Mensinger didn’t set out in her college career to discover if attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder actually occurred in adolescents and adults.

“I wouldn’t say at the outset it was at the top of my list,” the clinical social work graduate student said of the ailment. “But it was intriguing. It’s a highly unrecognized disease among adults.”

Thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, MSU psychology Professor Joel Nigg is heading up a research project to figure out how the disorder works in the adolescent and adult brain.

Nigg began studying the disorder in children 12 years ago. He recognized a lack of research being done on adolescents and adults believed to have the disorder and applied for a grant to begin such research with the help of MSU graduate students such as Mensinger in February.

Adult disorder symptoms include restlessness, inability to pay attention, frustration about not being able to accomplish goals, impulsive behavior and a lack of organization.

“I certainly hope that we can learn more about adolescents and adults that have difficulties and find more efficient ways of diagnosing and treating them,” said Mensinger, who interviews patients and performs data analysis for the project.

Project members are interviewing and testing patients and searching for more candidates. The grant money has been budgeted to cover patient compensation and administration costs, project secretary Lin Leslie said.

The project is looking for patients between the ages of 14 and 35 to participate in the study. The researchers are seeking more than 500 people, half who believe they have the disorder and half who do not. Participants cannot use drugs or suffer from depression, and they will be compensated for their time.

Mensinger said they interview two “informants” for every patient. Interviewers try to get a parent to fill them in on the patient’s childhood, and a friend or close family member to talk about the patient’s current behavior.

Nigg hopes the research will uncover new diagnosis methods for older patients.

“There’s not an objective laboratory test for the diagnosis,” he said. “You can’t just give a brain scan and see it.”

The group is utilizing the eye lab located in the Psychology Research Building to track eye movement.

Jeremy Athy, a recent MSU psychology graduate and eye lab employee, said patients follow a light box with their eyes and then are instructed to look the opposite way the box is moving.

“We track how well they can suppress the instinct to follow the box with their eyes,” Athy said.

Nigg, some health care providers believe the disorder is only a childhood disease - and those who believe it can extend into adolescence are “stuck using diagnostic and treatment methods that may work for children, but not older people.”

Nigg’s group is using cutting-edge techniques of language and visual processing to tap into the regions of the brain involved in attention problems, Nigg said.

“We’re using approaches of how to measure these functions that have never been applied to the disorder populations before,” Nigg said.

“Hopefully, some of these measures we’re developing will be assessment tools 25 years from now.”