The effects of physical exercise in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized control trials.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to examine the evidence for the effectiveness of exercise interventions on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related symptoms such as inattention, hyperactivity/impulsivity, anxiety and cognitive functions in children and adolescents. METHOD: Five databases covering the period up to November 2014 (PubMed, Scopus, EMBASE, EBSCO [E-journal, CINAHL, SportDiscus] and The Cochrane Library) were searched. Methodological quality was assessed using the Cochrane tool of bias. Standardized mean differences (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals were calculated, and the heterogeneity of the studies was estimated using Cochran's Q-statistic. RESULTS: Eight randomized controlled trials (n = 249) satisfied the inclusion criteria. The studies were grouped according to the intervention programme: aerobic and yoga exercise. The meta-analysis suggests that aerobic exercise had a moderate to large effect on core symptoms such as attention (SMD = 0.84), hyperactivity (SMD = 0.56) and impulsivity (SMD = 0.56) and related symptoms such as anxiety (SMD = 0.66), executive function (SMD = 0.58) and social disorders (SMD = 0.59) in children with ADHD. Yoga exercise suggests an improvement in the core symptoms of ADHD. CONCLUSIONS: The main cumulative evidence indicates that short-term aerobic exercise, based on several aerobic intervention formats, seems to be effective for mitigating symptoms such as attention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, anxiety, executive function and social disorders in children with ADHD.

Confabulation in schizophrenia: a neuropsychological study.

Confabulation has been documented in schizophrenia, but its neuropsychological correlates appear to be different from those of confabulation in neurological disease states. Forty-five schizophrenic patients and 37 controls were administered a task requiring them to recall fables. They also underwent testing with a range of memory and executive tasks. The patients with schizophrenia produced significantly more confabulations than the controls. After correcting for multiple comparisons, confabulation was not significantly associated with memory impairment, and was associated with impairment on only one of eight executive measures, the Brixton Test. Confabulation scores were also associated with impairment on two semantic memory tests. Confabulation was correlated with intrusion errors in recall, but not false positive errors in a recognition task. The findings suggest that confabulation in schizophrenia is unrelated to the episodic memory impairment seen in the disorder. However, the association with a circumscribed deficit in executive function could be consistent with a defective strategic retrieval account of confabulation similar to that of Moscovitch and co-workers, interacting with defective semantic memory.