Contact:
Mr. Roland Regino, University of California at Irvine
roland@msx.hsis.uci.edu  or 
Dr. Dan Cooper, University of California at Irvine
(714) 456-2317 or dcooper@uci.edu 
 

CHILDREN WITH ADHD MORE ACTIVE BUT LESS FIT (APS)

Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the most common psychiatric disorder among school-aged children, are by definition often highly over-active.  Their parents and teachers sometimes describe them as constantly being on the go or acting as if they were driven by a motor.   No couch potatoes here.  But does all this activity make them more fit?  One would think so, but the first study to measure ADHD children's cardiorespiratory fitness says not. In fact, boys with ADHD appear to be less fit than boys the same age without ADHD.

Roland Regino, Dr. Dan Cooper, Dr. James Swanson, and Sharon Wigal, University of California, Irvine, studied 10 boys, ages 6-14, with the most active forms of ADHD ("combined type" and "primarily hyperactive", as defined in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual).  After the boys had been off all ADHD related medications for two days, the researchers asked them to pedal a progressively more challenging bicycling machine while their efforts and various effort-related measures of fitness were being monitored.  Ten boys, similar except for ADHD, went through the same process.  The ADHD children scored significantly lower on two important measures of fitness: their peak VO2 and the oxygen circulating in their body in response to the effort.  The scores did not appear to be motivational, since measures were taken of other conditioning variables independent of the bicycling task at hand. But Dr. Regino says that the overall reduction in fitness may be a result of the inability of children with ADHD to sustain high-intensity exercise, due to lack of focus or simply an inability to deal with uncomfortable exercise.  The boys had been asked to pedal "as long as they could."  Although all the children completed the study, two of the boys with ADHD stopped much earlier than expected, while their heart rates were still relatively low.

The UCI team plans to continue their research to identify the factors contributing to the reduced fitness level and to see if a well-planned exercise training program would improve the fitness level of children with ADHD - and possible affect other aspects of the disorder, including  improved attention and decreased hyperactivity.