Four studies appearing in the August 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry evaluated the outcomes of children who participated in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (MTA), the first major randomized trial comparing different treatments of ADHD. The initial results of MTA were published in 1999.

During the 14-month controlled treatment period, children with ADHD were assigned to receive usual community care or one of three treatments: medication alone, medication plus behavioral therapy, or behavioral therapy only.

Ratings from both family members and teachers favored the combination treatment, and careful medication management was more successful than medication provided through usual community care sources.

After 14 months of controlled treatments, families were free to choose the kind of treatment their children received, if any.

In one of the follow-up studies, researchers evaluated the children three years after the controlled treatment ended -- when they were 10 to 13 years old. They found that while 45 percent to 71 percent of the children were taking medication, continuing medication treatment was no longer associated with better outcomes.

"Our results suggest that medication can make a long-term difference for some children if it's continued with optimal intensity and not started or added too late in a child's clinical course," Peter Jensen, a researcher at Columbia University, said in a prepared statement.

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