How efficacious and safe is short-acting methylphenidate for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder in children and adolescents? A meta-analysis.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Numerous small clinical trials have been carried out to study the behaviourally defined efficacy and safety of short-acting methylphenidate compared with placebo for attention-deficit disorder (ADD) in individuals aged 18 years and less. However, no meta-analyses that carefully examined these questions have been done. We reviewed the behavioural evidence from all the randomized controlled trials that compared methylphenidate and placebo, and completed a meta-analysis. METHODS: We searched several electronic sources for articles published between 1981 and 1999: MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsychINFO, ERIC, CINAHL, HEALTHSTAR, Biological Abstracts, Current Contents and Dissertation Abstracts. The Cochrane Library Trials Registry and Current Controlled Trials were also consulted. A study was considered eligible for inclusion if it entailed the following: a placebo-controlled randomized trial that involved short-acting methylphenidate and participants aged 18 years or less at the start of the trial who had received any primary diagnosis of ADD that was made in a systematic and reproducible way. RESULTS: We included 62 randomized trials that involved a total of 2897 participants with a primary diagnosis of ADD (e.g., with or without hyperactivity). The median age of trial participants was 8.7 years, and the median "percent male" composition of trials was 88.1%. Most studies used a crossover design. Using the scores from 2 separate indices, this collection of trials exhibited low quality. Interventions lasted, on average, 3 weeks, with no trial lasting longer than 28 weeks. Each primary outcome (hyperactivity index) demonstrated a significant effect of methylphenidate (effect size reported by teacher 0.78, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.64-0.91; effect size reported by parent 0.54, 95% CI 0.40-0.67). However, these apparent beneficial effects are tempered by a strong indication of publication bias and the lack of robustness of the findings, especially those involving core ADD features. Methylphenidate also has an adverse event profile that requires consideration. For example, clinicians only need to treat 4 children to identify an episode of decreased appetite. INTERPRETATION: Short-acting methylphenidate has a statistically significant clinical effect in the short-term treatment of individuals with a diagnosis of ADD aged 18 years and less. However, the extension of this placebo-controlled effect beyond 4 weeks of treatment has not been demonstrated. Exact knowledge of the extent and definition of the short-term behavioural usefulness of methylphenidate is questioned.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.023 | 0.067 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".