When Ethan Staal’s medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) began to wear off at the end of the school day, his parents were prepared for a difficult moment. The effectiveness of most stimulant ADHD drugs typically declines anywhere between four and 16 hours after being taken, and can lead to children feeling sad or experiencing outbursts, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Staal’s feelings sometimes intensified faster than he could manage, the family, who live in Minnesota, shared with The Mayo Clinic. After becoming overwhelmed and “not accessible,” it would take him an hour to calm down.
The clinic, one of the world’s leading institutions on personalized medicine, provided the Staal family with a Garmin smartwatch for their five-year-old son to track his heart rate, movement, and sleep. This activity tracker, popular among athletes, was set up to send an alert to the parents’ phones when readings suggested he was becoming more stressed.
“It gave us a warning that something was coming,” Sarah Staal told the clinic. “We could help him recover in five to 10 minutes. And we could have our evenings again as a family.”
A ‘game-changer’
Staal, who is now eight, was one of 50 children between the ages of three and seven years old who wore a Garmin watch for four months for a 2022 clinical trial. Not every child had ADHD—about half did and were already being treated with stimulants—but all had behavioral problems. Nearly one in five children in the U.S. lives with a mental, behavioral, or emotional health disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Mayo Clinic researchers wanted to see if the gadget could help parents ease their child’s distress when professional help wasn’t immediately accessible. They also wanted to find out whether families would actually use the watches and if alerts sent to parents’ phones would prove helpful in responding to tantrums.
The trial found that kids wore the watches about 75 percent of the time, and that alerts prompted parents to respond within an average of four seconds to early signs of distress. Severe tantrums were also a lot shorter—cut by about 11 minutes—while the kids were wearing the watch.
“It was a game-changer,” Jared Staal, Ethan’s father, said. “We still have challenges, but now we see them coming and we see them through a whole different lens—we didn’t always know how to support him in those moments, and now we do.”
In the future, the researchers hope to focus on testing the effectiveness of the watches on larger groups.
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Lifelong struggle for millions
ADHD is one of the most common neuro-developmental disorders in childhood, which leaves children unable to focus or control impulsive behaviors. An estimated seven million children in the U.S., between the ages of three and 17 years old, have been diagnosed with ADHD, according to the CDC.
The majority of those affected are boys. Researchers believe this is due to genetic differences, although they are still working to find out precisely why. Approximately 3.5 million children, aged 3 to 17, take an ADHD medication. Doctors have relied on prescription medications Adderall and Ritalin to treat ADHD for decades.
However, new research from Washington University in St. Louis on nearly 6,000 children has shown the drugs may not work as previously believed, affecting the brain’s reward and wakefulness centers instead of regions that control attention.