Psychosocial Treatments for ADHD: A Systematic Appraisal of the Evidence

Watson SMR et al. – Synthesis of findings from the five top–rated reviews and the literature on ADHD suggest that psychosocial treatments contribute to improvements on behavioral and social outcomes. How ADHD and LD interplay in treatment outcomes is largely unexplored.

Methods

• Electronic databases were searched for peer-reviewed, English language studies of psychosocial treatments for ADHD in children up to 18-years-old from 1998 to 2010.
• Twenty-one studies were identified that met inclusion criteria (13 systematic reviews, 8 meta-analyses).
• Independent examiners used the quality rating scale proposed by Auperin, Pignon, and Pynard (1997) to rate the characteristics of good systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Results

• Results indicated that certain methodological characteristics were common across trials reviewed, yet shortcomings were common among most reviews, including inadequate descriptions of data extraction methods and lack of quality ratings for trials included in the reviews.

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