Health Policy Centre Review 6 About the Children’s Health Policy Centre Compelling choices for treating childhood ADHD We are an interdisciplinary research group in Effective treatments are needed for the estimated 2.5% the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser of Canadian children — or nearly 17,000 in BC — who University. [...] Such an assessment should include carefully A careful and interviewing children and caregivers to determine the history, frequency, severity and comprehensive impact of the symptoms as well as potential causes. [...] Why do these distinctions matter? If we erroneously focus on factors that are not truly causal, we divert time The review also identified a number of gene and and resources away from searching for and addressing chromosomal variations implicated in ADHD.2 Even so, factors that can really make a difference for children.2 the individual effects of identified genetic variations were In addition, focu. [...] The first child-focused RCT evaluated Braingame Brian, which aimed to increase executive functioning skills — including improving memory and cognitive flexibility and decreasing impulsive responding.17 Children were randomized to participate in either the full version of Braingame Brian (where the difficulty of all tasks was automatically adjusted to the child’s performance level), a “partial” ver. [...] These children also had less severe ADHD symptoms, with 42.3% to 51.4% falling in the “normal to borderline range,” compared to 32.9% in the comparison group.15 This guanfacine study also assessed side effects comprehensively, using laboratory tests and physical examinations.15 Children on guanfacine as an adjunct to psychostimulants experienced more side effects than children who took only psycho.
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