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Efficacy of Neurofeedback on Adults with Attentional Deficit and Related Disorders
David A. Kaiser EEG Spectrum, Inc. Encino, CA December 1997
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Discussion The present study demonstrated the efficacy of neurofeedback in treating attentional deficits in adults using an outcome study. Significant improvement was found for inattention, impulsivity, and variability of response after 20 or more sessions of neurofeedback. On average, neurofeedback restored these properties of attention to nearly the population mean (i.e., value of 100).
The effectiveness of neurofeedback is all the more impressive given the fact that many of these subjects were þdifficultþ patients who had already undergone numerous prior treatments including stimulant medication with little or no success and a variety of settings and clinicians were involved in this study. Some of the adults had suffered from attentional and cognitive disorders for 20 to 30 years. All of these obstacles were overcome, indicating the robustness of this intervention. The extraordinary success rate of neurofeedback in remediating attentional problems, in the present and previous studies, at rates higher than stimulant medications in the present study, implies that profound effects on neurobiological mechanisms may be responsible for these results (Sterman, 1996; Othmer, 1998).
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