ADHD is a hot topic. I’m not one of those persons who says ADHD doesn’t exist. Actually, I traced the source of a news story from some months ago claiming that the ‘inventor of adhd’ had confessed at his dying bed that he made it up. In fact he said in an interview 7 months before his death that he though ADHD was over reported, which makes quite a difference.

The first of 2 new studies describes evidence of a link between social and economic status and childhood attention deficit disorder (ADHD) in the UK. A team led by the University of Exeter Medical School analysed data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a database of more than 19,500 UK children born between 2000 and 2002.

From the press release:

Findings showed that more children with ADHD came from families below the poverty line than the UK population as a whole, with average family incomes for households whose study child was affected by ADHD at £324 per week, compared to £391 for those whose child was not. The study found the odds of parents in social housing having a child with ADHD was roughly three times greater than for those who owned their own homes.

The team also found that the odds of younger mothers having a child with ADHD were significantly higher than for other mothers. Mothers with no qualifications were more than twice as likely to have a child with ADHD than those with degrees, and lone parents were more likely to have a child with ADHD diagnosis than households with two live-in parents.

You can read the whole article for free here for time being.

The second study examined the effect of computer-based training programs that claim to help children with ADHD succeed in the classroom and in peer relationships while reducing hyperactivity and inattentiveness. A University of Central Florida researcher now says that parents and schools are better off saving their cash.

From the press release:

Psychology professor Mark Rapport’s research team spent two years analyzing the data from 25 studies and found that those programs are not producing significant or clinically meaningful long-term improvements in children’s cognitive abilities, academic performance or behavior.

“Parents are desperate for help,” said Rapport, who runs the Children’s Learning Clinic IV at UCF. “If they can afford it, they are willing to spend the money, and some parents even enroll their children in private schools because they offer these cognitive training programs. But there is no empirical evidence to show those investments are worthwhile.”

Rapport initiated the study because many parents of children who have been evaluated at his clinic asked him whether they should invest in the programs. The study is featured in the December issue of Clinical Psychology Review.

His team analyzed published studies sponsored by the companies themselves as well as all independent published studies in the literature – and he drew his conclusions based on analyzing “blinded” studies, meaning studies in which researchers and independent raters used objective measures and did not know which children were assigned to the cognitive training programs as opposed to an inactive placebo condition.

Working memory represents one of the most important core deficits in children with ADHD, and improvements in working memory are associated with improved academic performance, behavior, peer relationships and other intellectual abilities. Surprisingly, although a majority of the cognitive training programs claimed to train this important aspect of brain functioning, closer examination of their training exercises revealed that they actually train short-term memory.

Short-term memory stores information in mind for a brief interval, whereas working memory uses the stored information for accomplishing a wide range of cognitive tasks, such as reading comprehension, mental math, and multitasking.

Rapport said his conclusions do not mean that the computer-based programs cannot become a helpful tool for children with ADHD. If programs can be designed to focus on working memory, it is worth evaluating whether they can help children’s cognitive abilities, academic performance and behavior, he said.

Abstract of this research:

Children with ADHD are characterized frequently as possessing underdeveloped executive functions and sustained attentional abilities, and recent commercial claims suggest that computer-based cognitive training can remediate these impairments and provide significant and lasting improvement in their attention, impulse control, social functioning, academic performance, and complex reasoning skills. The present review critically evaluates these claims through meta-analysis of 25 studies of facilitative intervention training (i.e., cognitive training) for children with ADHD. Random effects models corrected for publication bias and sampling error revealed that studies training short-term memory alone resulted in moderate magnitude improvements in short-term memory (d = 0.63), whereas training attention did not significantly improve attention and training mixed executive functions did not significantly improve the targeted executive functions (both nonsignificant: 95% confidence intervals include 0.0). Far transfer effects of cognitive training on academic functioning, blinded ratings of behavior (both nonsignificant), and cognitive tests (d = 0.14) were nonsignificant or negligible. Unblinded raters (d = 0.48) reported significantly larger benefits relative to blinded raters and objective tests (both p < .05), indicating the likelihood of Hawthorne effects. Critical examination of training targets revealed incongruence with empirical evidence regarding the specific executive functions that are (a) most impaired in ADHD, and (b) functionally related to the behavioral and academic outcomes these training programs are intended to ameliorate. Collectively, meta-analytic results indicate that claims regarding the academic, behavioral, and cognitive benefits associated with extant cognitive training programs are unsupported in ADHD. The methodological limitations of the current evidence base, however, leave open the possibility that cognitive training techniques designed to improve empirically documented executive function deficits may benefit children with ADHD.