2 London UK Studies On Non Medication Treatments For ADHD
Samuel Westwood from King's College London contacted us as follows:
I am a post-doc researcher at King's College London recruiting for two projects researching the effectiveness of non-drug treatments in children with ADHD. We're recruiting mainly from the London area, as the trials are being carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London (near Denmark Hill Station).
Trial 1 - fMRI Neurofeedback as a novel neurotherapy for children with ADHD
Children with ADHD will be trained over several sessions to enhance their brain activity in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner by playing on a computer game that is connected to your brain activity. By seeing your brain activity directly you will be able to learn to change it. This is called Neurofeedback. We have found in our pilot study that this Neurofeedback training improved all the behavioural problems ADHD children have and the attention skills as measured in attention tests. Furthermore, we found that the positive effects were still observed and even better 11 months after the study and that there were no side effects of any kind. This study will be much larger and we plan to find the same positive effects again. This study will help to develop a new treatment for ADHD that is not using medication but trains the ability of the patients to self-regulate their brain activity. The trial is being carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, at King's College London (near Denmark Hill Station)
Trial 2 -- A novel brain-based therapy for ADHD children using
transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) combined with cognitive training
Children/adolescents with ADHD will be trained overall several sessions to improve their attention skills with a computer game and at the same time they will receive brain stimulation using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). tDCS consists of very small electrical currents which will be placed over a frontal part of your brain to boost the learning effect in the computer game by giving your brain an extra "push". This technique has been around for more than 20 years, it is completely safe, has no side effects and is used in many other patient groups. This study will help to develop a new treatment for ADHD that is not reliant on pharmacological medication but on the patients' own training of their attention and self-control skills with the extra help of some brain stimulation. The trial is being carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London (near Denmark Hill Station)
