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.

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