Treatments for ADHD: beyond stimulants

If your child has ADHD or you're curious about its treatments, check out my piece for Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00095-w

All brains are different. ADHD isn't a "problem", it's a variant in brain wiring. We can harness its advantages, or alter our environment to reduce the disadvantages. Along the way, we can also treat the symptoms that are making life hard. This feature is about that. 

Main messages:

- Stimulants like Ritilin and Adderall work really, really well: they are some of the most efficacious drugs on the market for ANY condition.

- These drugs improve all kinds of measures, not just the core symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, but also self esteem, reduced car crashes, less criminal behaviour, etc. But they don't magically make your kid smarter (they don't necessarily do better on tests) and they might wear off after a few years of use.

- stimulants come with issues for some people (addictive qualities, misuse, anxiety) 

- There are other drugs available, notably alpha agonists, which a lot of people haven't heard of but can work just as well or better for some people.

- other innovative drugs are in the pipeline but none look particularly promising. Again, stimulants work REALLY well so they're hard to beat.

- what about non-drug options? You can stimulate or exercise the brain to build up the bits that need work in ADHD patients.

- exercise, meditation, talking therapy - none have been shown to work very well (but they probably help with other issues, like self esteem etc!)

- neural feedback (where you get a visual representation of what's going on in your brain, to help you direct blood flow etc to certain bits) also doesn't seem to work well, even though it sounds like it should work.

- neural stimulation (where you literally give tiny electric shocks to part of your brain from a headband) might work! It's early days so hard to say, and there's different types, but some of it might work.

One of the researchers I spoke to has ADHD himself and has never chosen medication... instead he drinks a lot of coffee, and lets his interest in his work, and his hyperfixation, help him to achieve great things. That story didn't make it into the piece. But it just goes to show... ADHD brains for the win.