Söderlund Göran B W, Björk Christer, Gustafsson Peik
Faculty of Teacher Education and Sport, Sogn og Fjordane University College Sogndal, Norway.
Department of Pupil Welfare, Municipality of Skellefteå Skellefteå, Sweden.
Front Psychol. 2016 Sep 5;7:1331. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01331. eCollection 2016.
Recent research has shown that acoustic white noise (80 dB) can improve task performance in people with attention deficits and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This is attributed to the phenomenon of stochastic resonance in which a certain amount of noise can improve performance in a brain that is not working at its optimum. We compare here the effect of noise exposure with the effect of stimulant medication on cognitive task performance in ADHD. The aim of the present study was to compare the effects of auditory noise exposure with stimulant medication for ADHD children on a cognitive test battery. A group of typically developed children (TDC) took the same tests as a comparison.
Twenty children with ADHD of combined or inattentive subtypes and twenty TDC matched for age and gender performed three different tests (word recall, spanboard and n-back task) during exposure to white noise (80 dB) and in a silent condition. The ADHD children were tested with and without central stimulant medication.
In the spanboard- and the word recall tasks, but not in the 2-back task, white noise exposure led to significant improvements for both non-medicated and medicated ADHD children. No significant effects of medication were found on any of the three tasks.
This pilot study shows that exposure to white noise resulted in a task improvement that was larger than the one with stimulant medication thus opening up the possibility of using auditory noise as an alternative, non-pharmacological treatment of cognitive ADHD symptoms.
近期研究表明，声学白噪声（80分贝）可改善注意力缺陷和/或注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）患者的任务表现。这归因于随机共振现象，即一定量的噪声可改善未处于最佳工作状态的大脑的表现。我们在此比较噪声暴露与兴奋剂药物对ADHD患者认知任务表现的影响。本研究的目的是比较听觉噪声暴露与兴奋剂药物对ADHD儿童认知测试组的影响。一组发育正常的儿童（TDC）作为对照进行相同测试。
20名患有混合型或注意力不集中型ADHD的儿童以及20名年龄和性别匹配的TDC儿童，在暴露于白噪声（80分贝）和安静条件下进行三项不同测试（单词回忆、跨板任务和n-back任务）。ADHD儿童在服用和未服用中枢兴奋剂药物的情况下接受测试。
在跨板任务和单词回忆任务中，但在2-back任务中未发现，白噪声暴露使未用药和用药的ADHD儿童均有显著改善。在这三项任务中的任何一项上均未发现药物有显著影响。
这项初步研究表明，暴露于白噪声导致的任务改善比使用兴奋剂药物更大，从而开辟了将听觉噪声作为认知ADHD症状的替代非药物治疗方法的可能性。
