Attention deficits: drugs, therapy, cognitive training

Shel­ley launched a good dis­cus­sion on The Neu­ro­science of ADHD in her blog, dis­cussing the sit­u­a­tion and pro­vid­ing a tech­ni­cal overview of drug-based inter­ven­tions. Some­thing I had­n’t heard is that “For exam­ple, babies born pre­ma­ture­ly face a sig­nif­i­cant­ly greater risk of devel­op­ing ADHD than full-term babies (socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus was con­trolled for).”

Which helps me bet­ter under­stand the need to think about pre-school­ers, as dis­cussed in the arti­cle Diag­nos­ing ADD/ ADHD in Preschool­ers, at ADDi­tude Mag­a­zine. I quote:

• “The Preschool ADHD Treat­ment Study, or PATS, con­duct­ed by the Nation­al Insti­tute of Men­tal Health (NIMH), is the first long-term study designed to eval­u­ate the effec­tive­ness of treat­ing preschool­ers with ADHD with behav­ioral ther­a­py, and then, in some cas­es, methylphenidate. In the first stage, the chil­dren (303 preschool­ers with severe ADHD, between the ages of three and five) and their par­ents par­tic­i­pat­ed in a 10-week behav­ioral ther­a­py course. For one third of the chil­dren, ADHD symp­toms improved so dra­mat­i­cal­ly with behav­ior ther­a­py alone that they did not progress to the ADHD med­ica­tion phase of the study.”

As Shel­ley’s post and the arti­cle explain, drugs do help when used appro­pri­ate­ly. Now, they are not the only answer. I am hap­py to see that behav­ioral ther­a­py can be as use­ful when appro­pri­ate. Which is not a sur­prise, giv­en the grow­ing lit­er­a­ture on dif­fer­ent meth­ods of cog­ni­tive train­ing, includ­ing ther­a­py and work­ing mem­o­ry train­ing like the one dis­cussed with Notre Dame’s Bradley Gib­son and in our post Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science and ADD/ADHD Today.