Now that the year is coming to an end, we are flooded with reviews of the year. For many reasons, 2016 wasn’t a particularly good year: especially some “democratic” decisions made this year cast some doubt on the so-called “swarm intelligence” which in 2016 apparently turned into “swarm dullness”. With alt-right, fake news and the post-factual world being an imminent threat to mental sanity, we can only hope for a better 2017. Anyway – that’s not the topic of this blog post. As many other journals did, the top journal of the Medical World, NEJM has nominated their top articles in each speciality (http://www.jwatch.org/na43004/2016/12/23/nejm-journal-watch-psychiatry-top-stories-2016).
Amazingly, amongst the Top 10 papers in psychiatry, three dealt with ADHD – and even better, two of them featured IMpACT / MiND / Aggressotype / CoCA researchers in the author list! The papers are in detail:
- the finding that the use of stimulants is safe in bipolar disorder with comorbid ADHD (Viktorin et al.; http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.16040467 – also one of my favourite studies this year)(with H. Larsson, IMpACT / MiND / CoCA)
- a meta-analysis showing that EEG-based neurofeedback does not have a significant beneficial effect in ADHD, and also suggesting that unblinding of the rater might have influenced positive reports (http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567(16)30095-8/abstract)(with Dani Brandeis, Aggressotype)
- the equally sad as important report that young children (aged 5 to 11), who died by suicide, had more frequently symptoms of ADHD, rather than depressive features (almost 60% of 87 children). Also for this most devastating outcome, it is thus very important to adequately diagnose ADHD (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/138/4/e20160436) especially considering that ADHD goes along with an increased risk for suicide life-long which can be lowered by MPH treatment.
In my opinion, the fact that the editors picked three ADHD-relevant papers for their top 10 list demonstrates that ADHD is a hot topic and that we provide cutting edge research in the field – and we will continue to do so in 2017! Watch out at this space for more news on ADHD / ASD, my personal top picks in 2016 and more exciting research in the coming year! Merry New Year and all the best for 2017 for all of you, may it bring peace, happiness and reason to this discomposed world.
Mind the Gap Blog