EXCLUSIVE My entire body went numb and I couldn't walk after taking common ADHD drug prescribed to millions
Hannah Schweickert never thought a common medication for ADHD would leave her numb from her face to her toes, at times unable to walk.
Schweickert, from Indiana, has had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder since she was young. Doctors had prescribed her the popular drug Adderall, a stimulant taken by 16million Americans known to improve focus, attention, and impulse control.
She started on a low dose, standard practice doctors follow to minimize side effects, which can include insomnia, increased heart rate, anxiety, mood swings, and jitteriness.
When she showed no improvement, doctors increased the dosage, first to 15mg, then to 20mg, 30mg, and, finally, 40mg, her highest dose.
Schweickert, 25, took a 40mg tablet every day for about two months with little incident.
But when she went on a family vacation, she began experiencing troubling symptoms she didn't immediately connect to the prescription stimulant.
'I was scratching my neck and I couldn't feel anything. My neck had no feeling,' she said.
That numbness spread from her neck to her fingertips, and a week later, to her cheeks, eventually taking over her whole body.
Back at college one night, alone in her room and unable to feel her bed underneath her, she panicked.
'I thought I was dying,' she said, describing a destabilizing panic attack.
'I immediately shot up, couldn't breathe, my heart was beating out of my chest.
'I didn't know what a panic attack was, but that's definitely what was happening.'
Schweickert laid in a state of panic for an hour before a friend was able to get to her. She calmed herself, but it was far from the last panic attack that would strike.
She said in a TikTok: 'Then that started happening every day. The worst one probably lasted about two hours.
'I couldn't walk. My friends had to carry me to pee.'
She went on to say she had gone to the emergency room for her panic attacks, a common response people have to the sense of chest-tightening panic that mimics a heart attack, four times over the next few months, but doctors were stumped.
Her mom then suggested something that had not occurred to Schweikert previously: stop taking Adderall.
'At this point, I had no feeling in my entire body,' Schweickert said. 'It had been 22 days with no feeling. So all my nerves, something was wrong with them.'
Doctors would test her ability to feel touch on her arms, head, and legs, and according to them, everything seemed normal. She said they were not concerned and let her leave without any answers.
So she took it upon herself to figure out what was going on.
Schweickert stopped taking her Adderall for a week, something doctors do not generally recommend because the withdrawal symptoms can be intense, causing depression, anxiety, headaches, muscle aches, and sleep disruptions.
But some of her numbness subsided in that time. She continued her research, having seen a study that found rats given Adderall at high doses experienced considerable changes in their brains.
The 2017 study, published in the journal Neuroscience Letters, studied rats given 10mg of amphetamine (a key component of Adderall) and an antidepressant called desipramine, which extends the stimulant's effects.
The rats' dopamine levels plummeted and stayed low for seven days after a single dose. In addition to producing feelings of motivation and reward, dopamine can regulate pain and sensory signals.
But the researchers also found evidence of other neurotoxic effects in rats that could potentially explain Schweickert's reaction.
The medicine starved the rats' brain cells of their energy source within an hour, making it impossible for nerve cells to send signals. This could lead to Schweiker's initial feelings of having a dead limb or tingling.
The medicine then overstimulated their brain cells by flooding the brain with glutamate, a chemical that can be toxic in high amounts. In humans, this could lead to hyperexcited nerves burning out, causing paralysis or numbness.
The drug also caused a chemical 'explosion' in the brain that wiped out the brain's natural defenses against antioxidants.
In humans, the destruction of the chemical in the brain that acts as a fire extinguisher against harmful substances called free radicals can cause nerve pain and numbness, particularly in the arms and legs.
'That's the only thing that I found on the internet in a study that I was like, actually this could be what's happening to me,' she said.
She said she had never heard of someone having 'allergic or neurotoxic effects' from Adderall, but added, 'there must be someone in the world who's also experienced this.'
The feeling in Schweickert's body did not return completely, even after six months without taking the medication.
'[I got] really nervous that my feeling would never return,' she said. 'Now I can say that it has.'
There are few studies that delve into the potential brain-poisoning effects of stimulants, including Adderall and Ritalin.
Maria Ingalla, an Arizona-based nurse practitioner of psychiatry, told DailyMail.com if Schweikert had taken other drugs recreationally, their effects could have compounded Adderall's tendency to constrict blood vessels, thereby reducing blood flow and causing numbness.
Ingalla said: 'If she tried this med recently after a psychedelic or other drugs, it wouldn't be an unusual reaction because of additive effects those drugs can have on vasoconstriction and the sensory systems of the brain.'
Schweickert did not say in the video whether she had been taking any other medication or drug at that time.
Figures for the number of children taking Adderall or other ADHD medications are hard to pin down due to differences in prescription databases, changing trends over time (due to the Adderall shortage in 2022, for instance), state-by-state variations in reporting, and the rise of telehealth prescriptions.
But current estimates say that around 10 percent of American children, aged two to 17, have been diagnosed with ADHD, and 62 percent of them are being treated with medications, translating to about 4.5 million children.
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