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Brief thread: I hadn& #39;t heard of this FDA-Clearance for gaming tx for ADHD, but just looked it up. Primary evidence is a recently published prospective randomized controlled trial. PDF here: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-7500%2820%2930017-0">https://www.thelancet.com/action/sh... Trial registration here: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-7500%2820%2930017-0">https://www.thelancet.com/action/sh... https://twitter.com/lervag/status/1275129510866845697">https://twitter.com/lervag/st...
2/n: Good news: No major or concerning changes in the registration (i.e., no outcome switching for the primary & secondary analyses). Also, there& #39;s a digital appendix to view a video of the training game, here: #supplementaryMaterial">https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500%2820%2930017-0/fulltext #supplementaryMaterial">https://www.thelancet.com/journals/...
3/n: More good news: They used an active control group that played a different game from the treatment game that elicited similar improvement expectations for the child subjects & their parents.
4/n: Bad news: 1 problem w/ the study is that the treatment is a video game combining a Mario-Kart-like navigation task with a go-no-go task, & the primary outcome is the TOVA, a computerized sustained-attention/go-nogo task that doesn& #39;t seem too removed from the training game.
5/n: So, they trained kids on a video game & showed greater-than-control improvement on a similar test (TOVA). The control& #39;s placebo game was a word game that one wouldn& #39;t expect to improve TOVA performance. So, did ADHD improve or did they get good at a particular skillset?
6/n: Supporting the concern that this is a skill benefit rather than an ADHD symptom benefit, there were no significant changes is assessments of kids& #39; functioning in the real world. So, they improve on a computer test but not necessarily in life.
7/n: To be fair, the intervention lasted only a month. Might not be reasonable to expect much change in everyday symptoms. But that means we don& #39;t know whether ADHD kids will show "far transfer" benefits to performance in different domains from the trained game.
