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Most children with ADHD receive their care from community-based pediatricians, so it is especially important for that care to be consistent with best-practice guidelines.
Unfortunately, all too often it is not.
Here is a brief summary of some key ADHD guidelines published by the American Academy of Pediatrics [Read more…] about 5 Reasons Why Parents of Children with ADHD Need to Become Proactive, Well-Informed Advocates
In 2005 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) began an initiative to promote an approach to care among its members in which “…the pediatric team works in partnership with a child and a child’s family to assure that all of the medical and non-medical needs of the patient are met.” A critically important focus of this approach is the role of the family and child — as developmentally appropriate — in the development of an overall plan of care.
This shared decision-making approach is especially important for conditions like ADHD where there is not a single treatment that is the most appropriate and preferred option for all patients. However, [Read more…] about Study: Families’ Perspectives on ADHD and its Treatment
Like all psychiatric disorders, ADHD is diagnosed based on the presence of particular behavioral symptoms that are judged to cause significant impairment in an individual’s functioning, and not on the results of a specific test. In fact, recently published ADHD evaluation guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) explicitly state that no particular diagnostic test should be routinely used when evaluating a child for ADHD.
While most ADHD experts would agree that no single test could or should be used in isolation to diagnose ADHD, there are several important reasons why the availability of an accurate objective test would be useful.
First, many children do not receive a careful and comprehensive assessment for ADHD but are instead diagnosed with based on evaluation procedures that are far from optimal.
Second, although AAP guidelines indicate that specific diagnostic tests should not be routinely used, many parents are concerned about the lack of objective procedures in their child’s evaluation. In fact, many families do not pursue treatment for ADHD because the the absence of objective evaluation procedures leads them to question the diagnosis. You can read a review of an interesting study on this issue at www.helpforadd.com/2006/january.htm
For these reasons an accurate and objective diagnostic test for ADHD could be of value in many clinical situations. Two important conditions would have to be met for such a test to be useful.
First, it would have to be highly sensitive to [Read more…] about Neurofeedback/ Quantitative EEG for ADHD diagnosis
