Professional Article Review - Essay Example

The present study aims to investigate the long term impacts of MPH on ADHD affected children and comparative affect of academic intervention along with other covariates age, sex, IQ etc. The study involved 85 children with ADHD and within the age group of 5-12 years. Baseline assessments included Wide range achievement test-revised (WRAT-R), parent and teacher rating of ADHD symptoms and academic achievement, estimated intellectual ability, OCHS academic and psychosocial ratings, duration of medication and academic support.

Post baseline assessments, children were randomly assigned to MPH treatment and placebo group in a double blind trial, the treatment group administered with a gradually rising dose of 5mg/administration to reach a target dose of 0.7mg/Kg body weight. Treatment was followed for 12 months keeping other conditions uniform, and the assessments done at baseline were repeated after the 12 month treatment period. Regression analysis was done to estimate academic performance one for each subset of WRAT-R and for parent and teacher ratings with baseline covariates and total treatments as variables.

The results indicated that neither medication nor academic interventions could be attributed to significant improvement in academic performance compared to baseline values. Critical Evaluation Studies on ADHD lack evidences of mechanism of associations between academic underachievement and ADHD and stimulants have been recommended based on short term trials showing positive impacts on symptoms in general. However, the authors rightly claim that data for long term and cumulative impact of MPH is unavailable.

The procedure followed by the authors is exhaustive involving baseline and post treatment assessments which are both subjective as well as objective. The explanations to the assessments, their design are either complete or are properly referenced, so as to enable repeatability. Both WISC-R and Ontario Child Health Scale (OCHS) are established clinical tool for IQ assessment of children with learning disabilities and ADHD. Objective ratings make the results easy to conduct and results specific.

Crossing over among children from the placebo and treatment groups was allowed but records were maintained. These records helped in estimating the total time of medication which represented cumulative effects of MPH, and the medication status at end of trial was indicative of the current effect. The continuation of additional interventions in form of academic support in addition to randomization of parents to training or self help group along with cross design, ensured that the trial were highly naturalistic.

While allowing for naturalistic design lead to lack of control on some important variables however the same was partially overcome by use of multiple regression analysis. The nature of academic support provided to the children was one very important variable. Regression analysis used also helped to overcome the loss in numbers due to crossing over during the study. Disparities in the results for objective and subjective assessments indicate that the efficacy of MPH is based on prejudices and is overrated.

The author claims that medication does not have