ABSTRACT

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a pediatric neuropsychiatric disorder, and is the most prevalent psychiatric disorder of childhood, affecting 3%–12% of school-age children in the United States. ADHD diagnosis mainly depends on an interview-based evaluation of the degrees of the phenotypes listed in the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-IV and DSM-5 as observed by a patient’s parents or teachers and often entails subjective evaluation. The Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder study funded by the National Institute of Health and the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that treatment with medication was superior to behavioral therapy for school-age children. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy is an increasingly popular neuroimaging technique for the noninvasive monitoring of human brain activity. It utilizes the tight coupling between neural activity and regional cerebral hemodynamic changes with a high affinity for studying developing brains.