Treatment of ADHD

Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a complex malady lacking one all-inclusive definition of the neurological disorder. However, the most widely accepted class of definitive behaviors are inattentiveness, hyperactivity and impulsiveness (Miler & Castellanos, 2016). More importantly, a variety of deficiencies in executive functioning skills exists among children with ADHD (Biederman et al., 2004), and response to drug therapies varies. Treatment for subjects becomes complicated because every case is unique. An ongoing clinical trial (PI: Dr. Robert Lodder) at the University of Kentucky (UK) is pairing a stimulant drug therapy with a therapeutic Minecraft regimen for children with ADHD. Eleven virtual worlds address different deficiencies in executive function. The effectiveness of this combination drug/device treatment is being tested. While the ability of video games to provide effective education already has strong support (Petrov, 2014), this research seeks to study the etiology of executive function changes by developing a series of neural networking systems that can simulate the executive functioning skills of real human subjects with and without ADHD. In the future, it may even be possible to optimize therapies for individual real patients using neural network simulations of those individuals.