It might not look like much of a video game, but Akili Interactive’s EndeavorRX, formerly Project EVO, may go down in history: it’s the first video game that can legally be marketed and prescribed as medicine in the US. That’s the landmark decision from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is authorizing doctors to prescribe the iPhone and iPad game for kids between ages eight and 12 years old with ADHD, after it underwent seven years of clinical trials that studied over 600 children to figure out whether a game could actually make a difference.

Children struggling with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder often take drugs such as Ritalin or Adderall. Now, doctors can write those kids a new prescription -- for a video game. But Dr. Joseph F. Hagan Jr. of the American Academy of Pediatrics in Itasca says the video game is not a game-changer and needs more study.

Now, a new study suggests that as the coronavirus pandemic turned family schedules upside down, kids' symptoms often worsened. The researchers surveyed 241 parents in China, found that the majority said their child's ADHD symptoms had worsened during lockdown and the switch to online schooling...The study...was published in the June issue of the Asian Journal of Psychiatry.

ADHD experts discuss the signs and symptoms of ADHD that bring people to doctors and what primary care physicians need to look for.

ADHD experts discuss the effect of ADHD on a person's quality of life and the need for proper diagnosis and treatment.

In a recently released issue of Pediatrics (https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2019-2832), Heather Girand and colleagues from the Ferris State University College of Pharmacy in Grand Rapids Michigan examine psychotropic pharmaceutical prescribing for children and young adults with ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) over the period 2006-2015 using publicly available healthcare datasets...The authors alert readers to the expectation that polypharmacy may be prevalent.

A provocative study recently published in Sociology of Education found that diagnosing and medicating children may actually do more harm than good when children exhibit only mild symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).1 Children in the study with less severe ADHD symptoms received similar scores on social and academic behavior to their peers diagnosed with more severe ADHD symptoms when the children in the less severe group received medication, compared with their unmedicated, but diagnosed peers.1

Both sleep problems and ADHD are common for adolescents, but little is known about the prospective link between sleep and subsequent ADHD symptoms in this patient group...The Shandong Adolescent Behavior and Health Cohort (SABHC) trial included 7072 adolescents in Shandong. Each patient was initially assessed between November-December 2015 and reassessed one-year later.