Post by rebeccah on Dec 1, 2016 12:56:27 GMT
*This study is looking for: Infants under 14 months old who have a older sibling or parent with ADHD or undiagnosed hyperactivity, living within 1 hour commute from London or Southampton*
Birkbeck BabyLab and the University of Southampton are launching a treatment program for infants under 14 months old who are at risk of developing ADHD.
ADHD often isn’t diagnosed until 6 or 7 years of age, when problems with attention span and behaviour are already becoming disruptive. Medication and parent training programs are available for children with an ADHD diagnosis; however, the best time to intervene is in infancy before the full symptoms of ADHD emerge. Currently, there are no available interventions for this age group.
To solve this problem, the research teams at Birkbeck and Southampton are running a study to look at the effectiveness of a new, computer-based, attention-training program to treat babies at increased risk for ADHD. The training program uses state-of-the-art technology to show rewarding images when the baby looks at certain parts of the screen. Researchers hope that this will help babies develop concentration and attention skills.
For this study, researchers will be recruiting 50 infants who have an older sibling or parent with ADHD or symptoms of hyperactivity, either in London or Southampton. They will receive 12 home-based visits, flexible around you, which will engage the infant with computer based games or cartoons. The study is a randomized controlled trial, which means that some infants in the study will receive our attention training and some infants will not. Infants who don’t receive the training will be in the ‘control group’. For your time we will also provide you with retail vouchers for a family-centered retailer for the amount of £40 after the first home visit and £40 after the final home visit.
We can test whether the games work by comparing attention skills in infants who do and don’t receive the training. To do this, we ask families to come into our BabyLab when their infant is 10-14 months, 14-18 months, 24 and 36 months old. During these visits we will study infants’ attention and other developmental skills to see whether the training program made a difference.
If successful, this study will help provide support to families who have a child diagnosed with ADHD and lay groundwork for other treatment programs. The study started in April 2015 will be running for the next two year (until July 2018).
This study also has full ethical approval obtained from NRES and is funded by MQ transforming mental health charity.
My name is Rebecca Holman and I am a research assistant on this study, if you have any questions or are interested in taking part or knowing more about the study you can contact me at r.elliotholman@bbk.ac.uk