Tai Chi Training for Children With ADHD
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02234557. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
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Official title
Movement-Based Training for Children With ADHD: A Feasibility Study
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has tremendous individual and societal impact, and the effectiveness of current standard treatments is limited. We examine a novel treatment that could remediate the core features of ADHD and thereby contribute to sustained improvements in behavioral control. This approach is motivated by mounting evidence that children with ADHD show difficulties with motor control, and that these motor deficits are strongly associated with the core behavioral features of ADHD. We employ Tai Chi, targeting improvements in well-established behavioral and physiologic measures of motor control, and with this, improvements in ADHD symptoms. The proposed study offers immense potential for the development of novel therapeutic approaches for ADHD with little risk of adverse reaction. The over-arching goal of this proposal is to examine a movement-based mindfulness training as a therapeutic intervention for children with ADHD. This approach is motivated by two complimentary lines of evidence: 1) Children with ADHD show impairments in motor control that parallel (and correlate with) core deficits in behavioral control that define the disorder. 2) Gains in cognitive and behavioral control have been observed in adults learning Tai Chi, dance, or meditation. These lines of evidence provide substantial motivation for our proposed investigation of movement-based mindfulness training in children with ADHD. Specifically, we propose to evaluate an established Tai Chi-based intervention. We chose this approach for a number of reasons: 1) Tai Chi is among the most well-established movement-based interventions with documented therapeutic effects, including cognitive effects. 2) While many movement-based approaches show evidence of yielding cognitive improvements Tai Chi provides excellent opportunities for engagement of 8-12 year old children in the form of the collaborative game "push hands." 3) Tai Chi instruction consists of gentle movements that can be practiced even by those with physical limitations, and is readily available in the United States so the protocols developed in this study will be straightforward to deploy at a national level. Hypothesis: After participating in a Tai Chi program, children with ADHD will show improvements in behavioral and physiologic measures of motor control. We further expect movement-based training will result in decreases in ADHD symptom severity.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT02234557
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 59 participants
Conditions and interventions
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 8 Years to 12 Years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Jul 16, 2014
- Primary completion
- Jan 14, 2020
- Completion
- Mar 14, 2020
- Last update posted
- Nov 12, 2023
2014 – 2020
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 1
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 1
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LEAP Facility at Kennedy Krieger Institute | Baltimore | Maryland | 21211 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT02234557, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Nov 12, 2023 · Synced Sep 3, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT02234557 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.