- Explain to interested patients that the findings suggest most children with ADHD do improve with treatment over time.
- Caution patients that the study did not compare treatment to no treatment for ADHD, and did not suggest that there was no benefit to treatment.
NEW YORK, July 20 -- Most kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) get better over time with treatment regardless of what that treatment is, according to observational follow-up of a major study.
Medication, behavioral therapy, a combination of the two, and usual community care all produced significant ADHD symptom improvement at three years with no difference between groups, found Peter Jensen, M.D., of Columbia University here, and colleagues.
However, "it would be incorrect to conclude from these results that treatment makes no difference or is not worth pursuing," they wrote in the August issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Indeed, they said, "these data suggest that clinicians should offer hope to children and families." The investigators original Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, published in 1999, was the first major randomized, controlled trial to compare ADHD treatments. It found that medication alone or with behavioral therapy was significantly better than behavioral therapy alone or usual community care.
