Treatment
Treatment of SCT has not been well investigated. Initial drug studies have been done only with the ADHD medication, methylphenidate (Ritalin/Concerta), and found that most children with DSM-III ADD-H (currently ADHD-C) responded well at medium-to-high doses. However, a sizable percentage of children with ADD without hyperactivity (using DSM-III criteria; therefore the results may apply to SCT) did not gain much benefit from methylphenidate, and when they did benefit, it was at a much lower dose. Tests in lab rats have demonstrated that low doses of Ritalin can increase norepinephrine levels. While methylphenidate and amphetamines have many similar effects on patients (both inhibit reuptake of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, for example), amphetamines also promote release of those neurotransmitters; therefore, Diamond argued, amphetamines may be more helpful than methylphenidate for individuals with ADD (and/or possibly SCT). However, one study found that the presence or absence of SCT symptoms made no difference in response to methylphenidate in children with ADHD-PI. Another study, a retrospective analysis of medical histories, also found that children with SCT responded well to methylphenidate.
Only one study has investigated the use of behavior modification methods at home and school for children with predominantly SCT symptoms and it found good success.
Some SCT individuals report anecdotally that they experience improvement in their ability to focus through meditation, but this claim has not been subjected to scientific study.
Read more about this topic: Sluggish Cognitive Tempo
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)