Effects of a Mindfulness-based Intervention on Children with ADHD

Abstract

The Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity (ADHD), results in impairments in the individual's quality of life, studies based on mindfulness interventions has shown improvement in this area, furthermore, this intervention model has low cost and can be applied in a school context. For that matter, this study aims to implement and evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention based on mindfulness in children with ADHD by identifying improvements in attention, secondarily it is intended to verify improvement in quality of life; identify differences in performance in attention and quality of life due to age and education. This is about a randomized clinical trial. Will be randomly drawn 30 children, aged 6 to 11 years, of both sexes, enrolled from 1^st to 5^th year of public and private schools in the city of São Paulo, with ADHD diagnosis, strengths in experimental (EG) and control (CG) groups. Will be excluded from this study children with ASD, ID and Learning Disabilities. For all stages of the RCT it will be used CPT and WHOQOL-BREF. The initial phase of this study involves the evaluation of EG and CG, then it´ll be implemented the intervention during 4 months, 2 times a week with sessions during 15 minutes that will be applied by special education teachers trained by the study researchers, the third phase consists of the reassessment from EG and CG and after 3 months from the end of the intervention the same instruments of phase 1 will be applied in order to verify the maintenance of possible identified gains. For analysis of the results, the normality of data distribution and classification of variables will be verified, in addition to analyzes to verify the effect size of statistically significant results (p < .05). Finally, the intervention is expected to improve the attention and quality of life of the participants.