A new therapy?
The findings suggest new potential treatment options for children with ADHD, and for their parents, Dr. Greven said, as well as a need to study the condition more broadly. “Although parents of children with ADHD often have elevated parenting stress, anxiety, or their own ADHD symptoms, usual interventions for children with ADHD do not typically target parental mental health,” she said. “As researchers, we need to go broader than just looking at whether an intervention reduces symptoms and include additional outcomes that families find important.”
It will take more research to find out who is most likely to benefit from mindfulness training and how long those benefits last, but the new study is a useful starting point, experts say.
“Mindfulness training had potentially short-term and long-term beneficial effects to children with ADHD and their parents,” says Samuel Wong, MD, director of the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He says mindfulness is more likely to become an add-on than a replacement for other kinds of therapies.
“Clinicians may consider combining or adding family-based mindfulness training with current practice for children with ADHD who have residual symptoms with their current treatment,” he said.
Mindfulness training may help with issues beyond the classic symptoms that come with ADHD, Dr. Mitchell said, helping make family life better overall, even when some features of the disorder don’t budge much.
“With this study in particular, we see that we have some pretty promising effects that there may be something that will be beneficial above and beyond the core 18 DSM symptoms,” he said. “This is an important study, because it’s going to be a basis for the continuing evolution of the scientific research on this topic. It’s something to feel excited about.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.