Daily Physical Activity and Severity of ADHD Symptoms
Timeline
January 2022 - March 2022 (10 weeks)
Role
1/4 Developer
Overview
The National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) has been providing rich data on the aspects of children’s lives, such as physical and mental health. Surveying questions range from mental and health behavior conditions to outside factors that may contribute to these conditions such as physical activity, background, community, etc. Because of the impact of receiving cognitive behavior therapy may have in improving ADHD symptoms, we hypothesize that physical activity helps reduce these symptoms as well. The purpose of this study is to answer whether or not there's a relationship between the amount of physical exercise and the parent-reported severity of ADHD symptoms. To answer this question, we used The National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) dataset from 2019 to serve children under 17 years old in order to measure physical activity participation and severity of ADHD symptoms. Once the data set was cleaned, individually analyzed, we visualized and analyzed the data to determine whether or not there is a relationship between the amount of physical exercise completed and the parent-reported severity of ADHD symptoms. Despite prior evidence and studies hinting that participating in physical exercise is related to reducing ADHD symptoms. After analyzing our data and the relationships between several variables, we came to the conclusion that our data does not indicate the presence of a statistically significant relationship between physical activity and the severity of ADHD symptoms.
Research Question
For kids with ADHD under 17 in 2018 and 2019, is there a relationship between parent-reported ADHD severity/symptoms and age, gender, being overweight, screentime, reception of behavior therapy, reception of medication, or exercise? And does the relationship between frequency of physical exercise and ADHD severity change depending on whether or not the child is in a certain group for one of the aforementioned conditions?
Background & Prior Work
Emerging Support for a Role of Exercise in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Intervention Planning. This source talks about how many of the current treatments for ADHD tend to have short-lived benefits, presumably because these treatments target symptoms of ADHD and not its underlying cause. Children with ADHD have a delayed trajectory of cortical development, so interventions that enhance their neural growth might be a more enduring approach. Exercise has been shown to have a variety of benefits for neural growth and development, as well as improving cognitive and behavioral well-being. The authors point out the lack of systematic research on the exact effects of exercise in the short and long term on treating ADHD.
Impact of physical exercise on children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorders This reference used performed an evidence-based meta-analysis with 14 studies and showed that physical exercise showed significant improvement in anxiety and depression, aggressive behaviors, thought and social problems among children suffering from ADHD.
Hypothesis
In our study, we hypothesize that the kids who exercise more frequently will have the severity levels, overweight status, screen-time, reception to behavioral therapy and medication for ADHD symptoms improved compared to those who do and do not receive cognitive and behavioral treatment. We believe that this is the case because of prior studies indicating that participating in any sort of daily physical activity results in a healthier and happier lifestyle.
Dataset
Dataset Name: National Survey of Children's Health's Data Resource Center for the Child & Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative
Link to the dataset: https://www.childhealthdata.org/dataset/download?rq=9507
The DRC makes full datasets of anonymized answers to the NSCH publically available for download in various file formats such as .csv for several years. We chose the 2018 and 2019 datasets to get the most recent survey answers that have not been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The subset of data that we are interested in those of children that have been diagnosed with ADHD. We used this dataset to determine if there is a relationship between a child who is reported to have ADHD and their answers to the survey questions that pertain to how much physical exercise they do in a week, the severity of their symptoms and if they have received behavioral treatment for their symptoms. We also use their reported sex to see if there was a significant difference between males and females with ADHD.
Setup
These are the relevant packages used in our project and what their purpose is:
numpy: used to easy creation and manipulation of arrays from columns of our dataset
pandas: used for creation and manipulation of DataFrame objects, especially for filtering out and grouping data by specific features for comparison
seaborn: used for data visualization in the form of histograms. Warnings were included for debugging purposes
scipy: used for conducting inferential statistical tests
Demographics of all respondents
Data Cleaning
Filtering out the data to only have the subset of children that have ADHD
The row [K2Q31B]: whether a child has ADHD or not
1: has ADHD
2: does not have ADHD
Exploratory Data Analysis
Data Analysis
Ethics & Privacy
It is very important to take privacy into consideration here due to ADHD being a personally diagnosed medical condition. As far as privacy goes, the data from this study is publicly available, consented to be used, and anonymized.
Biases that we could have is from our own perception of ADHD and the complexity of the disorder which could cause skewed data in our hypothesis’ favor. The largest group of respondents were white, and non-Hispanics, suggesting that kids from different racial and ethnic backgrounds were underrepresented in this data set.
By having predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria set for the data which we actually analyzed, it allowed us to detect specific biases and filter out the data that can be used. The results showing the differences among ADHD people and between people without ADHD may give positive or negative implications for those groups of people. By presenting the results in a neutral and objective manner to avoid positive or negative connotations that would come with the results of the papers’ experiments or observations.
Conclusion & Discussion
Undoubtedly, participating in any sort of extensive physical exercise does improve overall health. However, using the data that we have, we could not establish a statistically significant correlation between the values and metrics that we used. This means that we reject our hypothesis that daily physical exercise has a positive relationship with the severity of ADHD symptoms and the other values we looked into (overweight, treatment, medication, and screentime). Rather, by using the data that we have, we cannot establish a significant enough correlation between these values to create models that can reliably and confidently predict using a physical and mental health survey. This is due to many limitations and confounding variables, which are explained below.
Limitations
Some other variables of interest include a child’s ability to make friends if they have mood disorders such as anxiety and depression, and their level of social participation. However, we ultimately decided not to include those features in our project because within the codebook that explains the calculations, the age range is inconsistent among these variables and would require further filtering, losing a lot of our observations, and needing to reevaluate the distribution for each subset pertaining to one of these additional features.
An important consideration while using survey data is that it is self-reported, so there are concerns about biases and inaccurate responses. There could also be differences in how parents could have interpreted the intensity of symptoms when answering the survey questions, or they could have reported scores based on a doctor’s initial diagnosis rather than their own experience of their child’s symptoms at any point in time. However, the upside of using survey data is we can get a large sample size and higher ecological validity than a small-scale controlled study.
It’s also quite possible that there were repeat entries between 2018 and 2019 and because of the anonymization, we have no way of filtering these entries out to be entirely unique.
Impact of this work on society
The data we analyzed was split between the male and female sexes by proportion and we looked at the differences between those who are overweight, have been on medication, received treatment, and how much screentime they have. The severity of their symptoms was compared against these variables, as well as how much exercise each child gets in a week. The impact that this work can have on society can push for supplemental treatment for children with ADHD with a general idea of how frequent exercise can help with different levels of severity among children and between the sexes. ADHD is known to express itself differently between males and females and exercise is known for its benefits to mental health as well as physical. This work could also show the benefits of exercise to remedy characteristic symptoms of ADHD such as inattentiveness and hyperactivity and be generalized to help other people with these issues regardless of their diagnosis of ADHD.
