This review looked at children and adolescents diagnosed with ADHD. It covered 32 studies published from 2007 to 2024, mostly run in laboratory settings, and 9 came from China. Nearly all participants were children aged 5 to 12, with 70 adolescents also included. Medication use was mixed, and 11 studies did not report it. Of the 32 studies, 22 (968 people) were combined in the main analysis.
The programs mixed physical activity with thinking tasks. Compared with control groups, children in these programs did much better on accuracy in executive function tasks. They also responded a little faster. Overall ADHD symptoms went down, and so did hyperactivity. Inattention did not differ clearly between groups.
For motor skills, the authors report a medium effect, though the range of likely values they give includes no effect. The gain was larger against inactive controls. Against controls who were also active, motor skills were somewhat better in the control group, but this gap was not significant.
The type of activity, its intensity, how the content was organized, the amount of program time, and medication use all changed how large the effects were.
The studies disagreed a lot with each other on task accuracy. Samples were small, few studies used active controls, and long-term follow-up was often missing. Signs of publication bias appeared for three outcomes. The authors call the findings preliminary evidence.
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The numbers Stats and what the terms mean
The statistics behind the plain-language claims above.
- Fang, 2024: accuracy on executive function tasks SMD 1.10; overall ADHD symptoms SMD -0.75; motor skills SMD 0.52. Disagreement between studies on task accuracy I2=93 %.
What the terms mean:
- SMD (standardized mean difference) is an effect size, read the same way as d: roughly, 0.2 is small, 0.5 is moderate and 0.8 is large. A minus sign shows the direction of the change, not its size.
- I2 shows how much the studies disagreed with each other, from 0% to 100%. Higher means more disagreement.
Source: Fang Y, Sun F, Wang Z, et al.. Cognitively combined/engaged physical activity for the executive function, symptomology, and motor competence of children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Research in Developmental Disabilities (2024). doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2024.104880