ADHD behavioral treatment

Many chil­dren with ADHD ben­e­fit from med­ica­tion treat­ment, behav­ioral treat­ment, or their com­bi­na­tion, but oth­ers do not. In addi­tion, par­ents are often reluc­tant to start their child on med­ica­tion and high qual­i­ty behav­ioral treat­ments are not read­i­ly acces­si­ble in many areas. The long-term effi­ca­cy of these treat­ments is also less than desir­able. Thus, despite these evi­dence-based ADHD treat­ments, there is a press­ing need to devel­op nov­el treat­ments with strong research support.

A study pub­lished recent­ly in Trans­la­tion­al Psy­chi­a­try [Dakawar-Kawar et al (2023). Tran­scra­nial ran­dom noise stim­u­la­tion com­bined with cog­ni­tive train­ing for treat­ing ADHD: a ran­dom­ized sham-con­trolled tri­al.] reports promis­ing results for a nov­el ADHD treat­ment approach.

The Study:

Study par­tic­i­pants were 24 6–12 year-old chil­dren recent­ly diag­nosed with ADHD fol­low­ing a com­pre­hen­sive eval­u­a­tion. They were ran­dom­ly assigned to receive either a) a type of Tran­scra­nial Elec­tri­cal Stim­u­la­tion (TES) called Tran­scra­nial Ran­dom Noise Stim­u­la­tion (TRNS) or b) sham stim­u­la­tion; chil­dren in both groups engaged in com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing dur­ing the ses­sions. [Read more…] about Non-inva­sive Tran­scra­nial Elec­tri­cal Stim­u­la­tion (TES) shows ear­ly promise to treat ADHD symp­toms in children