TUESDAY, Sept. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) get more effective treatment if the physicians responsible for their care make full use of collaborative consultation services, including access to mental health professionals, researchers report in the September issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Jeffery N. Epstein, Ph.D., of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Ohio, and colleagues conducted a study of 52 community-based pediatricians and their 377 ADHD patients who were randomized to receive access to collaborative consultation treatment services or no intervention. The pediatricians self-reported on their own practices and improvements in their patients.
Many pediatricians did not make full use of the service, but among those who did, the children with ADHD under their care showed significant improvement in their behavior. The scope of the study did not include the barriers to service uptake by pediatricians.
"Pediatricians have to address a multitude of physical and mental disorders during the course of daily practice, and applying evidence-based methods to all these disorders, even when prescribed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, can be quite difficult," the authors write. "This model helped pediatricians overcome many of the common obstacles to conducting careful medication trials and showed promise in helping pediatricians' practice behaviors more closely approximate the evidence-based techniques."
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