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Brief thread: I hadn'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 Trial registration here: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-7500%2820%2930017-0 https://twitter.com/lervag/status/1275129510866845697
2/n: Good news: No major or concerning changes in the registration (i.e., no outcome switching for the primary & secondary analyses). Also, there's a digital appendix to view a video of the training game, here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500%2820%2930017-0/fulltext#supplementaryMaterial
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'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's placebo game was a word game that one wouldn'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' 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't know whether ADHD kids will show "far transfer" benefits to performance in different domains from the trained game.
8/8: I don't know the criteria for FDA "Clearance" (I assume that's different from "Approval"?), but I'm not too impressed yet. Show us some improvement beyond a similar computer task. The treatment game does like kinda fun, tho...
