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Was originally going to post "Well that's a big fat 'DUH!!!!'", but then I thought better.

It's good to have studies to back up these sorts of things that typically get treated as common sense.

Relevant, Hindsight Devalues Science: http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/

>Daphna Baratz exposed college students to pairs of supposed findings, one true ("In prosperous times people spend a larger portion of their income than during a recession") and one the truth's opposite. In both sides of the pair, students rated the supposed finding as what they "would have predicted". Perfectly standard hindsight bias.

>Which leads people to think they have no need for science, because they "could have predicted" that.

And if the science contradicts what their intuition tells them is correct - they disbelieve the science and cling to their intuition. Additionally, the progress of civilization can be measured most accurately by seeing which threats and dangers are removed from peoples lives. So when these people wish to trust their intuition rather than science, they are vindicated - they are protected by the umbrella of progress that intellectuals before them erected. So they now have the luxury of sitting back and decrying the costs of maintaining the infrastructure that protects them as unnecessary. This fuels the vaccine nonsense, fears of GM crops, fears of wifi signals in England, and all sorts of other similar issues. I expect these things will continue to increase until eventually major portions of the infrastructure of modern society will be dismantled or allowed to decay because no one believes they are necessary.
Very good point: while it is common sense and true that exercise reduces ADHD, it is also common sense (but not true!) to say that sun revolves around the earth or that, in a vacuum, a feather will hit the ground after a large ball of lead.

Much of Quantum Mechanics is also counter intuitive but true, while some scientific concepts can only be expressed through mathematics and have no simple intuitive explanation.

The 'duh' is that exercise has a positive effect on people.

That it's especially beneficial toward children with ADHD is not common sense at all.

What if it was less beneficial and so they needed more exercise than the average child? That would also be a perfectly reasonable result.

"Humans who evolved for constant outdoors activity and verbal co-ordination amongst tribe members don't do so well being told to sit down and shut up"

There are somethings that "civilisation" has brought us like medicine and plentiful energy and food that we want to keep - and some things like industrial work patterns and sedentary indoor lifestyles that we will want to remove.

Getting that balance right is not medication. It's whatever the opposite of medication is.

Edit: thank you for the science of common sense mention - I forget that we have too many politicians who already know what is common sense irrespective of double blind controls and it is worth celebrating the effort to prove one.

Children with ADHD, previously mislabeled "young boys", respond well to physical activity, previously mislabeled "recess".
There's an argument for ADHD being over-diagnosed, but your sentiment trivializes the issues that can prevent people like me from attaining a better quality of life. I was about 23 by the time I got treated for ADHD. I often wonder how different my trajectory as an adult might have been had I been treated while I was still in high school. I got abysmal grades -- just barely graduating, in fact -- and I dropped out of college rather quickly. I beat myself up on account of my failures, over which in hindsight I had very little control.

Amphetamines are no panacea. I don't truly know what I'm doing to my heart and brain in the long term, anorexia is a constant concern, and coming down from what I would describe as a 6-hour high can be devastating to my mood, but they overall they improved my quality of life and facilitated me attaining a career as a software developer. Perhaps more exercise would be just as effective as a treatment, but knowing that I had a legitimate problem was crucial.

+1 ADHD is real. It was a lot harder to get a career as a software developer started. I feel like without finally discovering the root of my problem and taking meds at age 18 it wouldn't have been possible. All those afternoons spent over procrastinating on homework.

Excercise helps. I feel lasting positive effects on mood and concentration when I lift regularly. Sadly, It doesn't alleviate the symptoms completly and doesn't cure the syndrome.

I think we'll be able to treat ADHD much more efficently when we have cheaper EEG that can be worn always. Recently the muse headband was introduced. I own one and it's a great leap forward. Sadly there's no app for neurofeedback training that is working with it yet...

The majority of "young boys" do not have ADHD, and "physical activity" is far more general than "recess".
I think this points out that the problem is we keep treating our children like adults. We've pushed to make them learn skills earlier to the point that kindergarden is now essentially first grade [0]. Additionally schools are cutting back on PE to be able to cram more education in [1].

The result I believe is that normal childhood development of self-regulation begins to look pathological and becomes diagnosed as ADHD. At the same time we've been demanding more at younger ages, ADHD diagnosis have greatly increased [2]. Additionally, roughly two-thirds of these kids won't have ADHD by the time they become an adult [3]. I think this points to the fact that we're simply expecting too much academically too early and we're compounding this by taking away the physical play that would help them develop.

We need to reset kindergarden back to where it was so that most kids have a chance to properly develop. We also need to restore the idea that children are suppose to play, that it's good for them and not a waste of time.

P.S: For that other 30%, ADHD is real and drugs may be entirely appropriate. I'd also suspect that more play and pushing learning later will help them as well.

P.P.S: We also need to find a way for the kids that do have the self-regulation to learn more advanced material. Right now schools do a terrible job of dealing with the kids on either end of the bell curve of learning skills.

P.P.P.S: Boys appear to lag girls by almost year in terms of their self-regulation [4]. I suspect that is why boys are far more diagnosed with ADHD. In any case, I believe this is hurting both boys and girls, it's just more apparent in boys.

[0]: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/what-happened-kin... [1]: http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/many-schools-cut... [2]: http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/11/25/adhd-diagnosis-treat... [3]: http://www.healthline.com/health-news/mental-adhd-causes-pro... [4]: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-gir...

Probably even worse than the reduction of PE time is the reduction of playground time and the overbearing focus on child safety ruining what remains. As stereotypical dorky kid, I never liked PE, but I'd happily run around outside for hours if I was playing tag or basketball or something with friends. I'm not sure if kids these days get to have that experience.
I don't know if I'd put this in the category of 'treating them like adults'... children are built to acquire skills. That is the central aim of their brains and they are particularly well formed for it. What we're treating them like is not adults (as we do not expect adults to be studious or continually learning), but an imaginary fiction of what children should be.

We've constructed an image of children that does not correspond with reality. We see a child being well-behaved and attentive to arbitrary authority figures as a necessary part of being a 'good child'. In reality, those attributes are destructive to human beings. Kow-towing to authority simply because it is authority, and not because it is presenting convincing arguments and ruling by persuasion, is not conducive to anything that would entice a human being.

I would also say seeing this as 'treating children as adults' isn't quite right because it coexists with our society aggressively infantilizing adolescents. We've redefined adolescence as simply more childhood, denying the neurological and psychological developments that come with puberty in order to continue to perpetuate the imaginary ideal of a perfectly submissive a-personal child. And still, they are judged by their submission as they become more aggressively oppressed, subjected to high schools which afford less freedom to their students than convicted felons receive in prison.

The goal of schools is supposed to be to convey knowledge and skills to children and adolescents. The tactics that have been adopted since roughly the mid-1990s seek to impose this knowledge on students rather than to encourage learning. And it's not effective. If you treat human beings like prisoners, even the children that everyone is so convinced are utterly incapable of self direction, the result will be resistance and "misbehavior". The day the misbehavior stops is the day anything 'human' inside that person dies.

maybe so-called normal adults today are pathological - look at the obesity epidemic here in the US
John Ratey wrote several good books on ADD/ADHD as well as this one: _Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain_ http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B... - it is pretty good.
Didn't use the existing title because it's potential hyperbolic/confusing (medication suggests a pharmaceutical, at least to me). Still, a potentially very important finding. Here's the newly-released paper cited in the article: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/09/...
It appears that paper has nothing to do with kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD... at least there's no mention of that in summary unless I'm really missing something. The article in the Atlantic cites other work that is ADHD-specific.

This is important because it is not uncommon to find interventions (including drugs) that benefit people who do not have a given condition that do nothing for people who have the condition.

To take a ridiculous but hopefully memorable example: steroids will not help a person with no arms lift more weight, even though they may help other people a lot. In the case of metabolic diseases, sufferers are generally missing important metabolic pathways that the rest of us have, so the example isn't completely irrelevant.

In the present case, I think it's perfectly reasonable that exercise will help (although what I think is perfectly reasonable and what is true have nothing to do with each other) and as the Atlantic articles says, other studies have shown this, but I just wanted to make a pedantic point about that particular pediatric paper.

The study says "The exclusion criteria included special educational services related to cognitive or attentional disorders ...". So kids diagnosed with ADHD had been specifically excluded. This should be tried on ADHD-diagnosed kids. If they're physically healthy, 70 minutes a day of mild exercise won't hurt them.
I'd rather keep my kid in and teach him to code.