Sparing a few minutes for exercise can help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to improve their academic performance, a new study says.
ADHD is one of the most common neurobehavioral disorders that affect three to five percent of school aged children in the country. Children with ADHD experience problems with paying attention or focus, troubles in controlling impulsive behaviors (acting without thinking about the consequences) and hyperactivity.
Stimulant medication like Ritalin, combined with counseling is used to treat the disorder, that cannot be fully cured and sometimes lasts even into adulthood.
The benefits and risks of the ADHD medication have been a topic of controversy from a long time. Ritalin is associated with many severe side effects like addiction, trouble sleeping, bed-wetting, depression and seizures.
High medication cost coupled with many side effects, parents often get concerned. To help the parents and to provide an alternative treatment for the disorder, Matthew Pontifex from Michigan State University and colleagues subjected 40 children aged between eight and 10 to two types of activities- walking briskly on a treadmill for 20 minutes or sitting at one place and reading.
Later, the children were given reading comprehension and math tests. They also played a computer game that required ignoring visual stimuli and deciding the direction a fish swims.
All the participants, showed remarkable improvement on tests and the game.
"This provides some very early evidence that exercise might be a tool in our nonpharmaceutical treatment of ADHD," Matthew Pontifex, MSU assistant professor of kinesiology, who led the study, said in a news release.
After reaching a conclusion, the authors urge parents to make their children physically active and schools to include more physical education programs.
"Maybe our first course of action that we would recommend to developmental psychologists would be to increase children's physical activity," Pontifex said.
Findings of the study have been published in the Journal of Pediatrics.
