Critical comments on the article “Increased risk of developing psychiatric disorders in children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) receiving sensory integration therapy: a population-based cohort study”

Excerpt

It remains controversial whether clinical interventions for children with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) increase the risk of subsequent psychiatric disorders [1, 2]. The current clinical intervention guidelines for children with ADHD have been constructed based on evidence-based studies to reduce the risk of adverse outcomes. Thus, readers will have been interested to learn about the effects of sensory integration (SI) intervention on children with ADHD as reported by Tzang et al. [5] in the respective population-based cohort study. Their study elucidated whether applying SI interventions to children with ADHD was associated with subsequent psychiatric disorders. The authors collected Taiwan National Health Insurance claims data from 2000 to 2008 and identified children aged < 8 years who were newly diagnosed with ADHD during 2000–2006 as the target population. Propensity score matching was applied to reduce selection bias and eliminate the possible influence of confounding variables. …