A recent article published in the Wall Street Journal suggests that at least one joint venture company believes that playing video games could be used as a treatment for ADHD. The company Akili Interactive Labs Inc. of Boston is currently seeking FDA approval with the hope that clinicians might turn to utilizing it as a treatment option prior to prescribing meds.

Purportedly the company is basing its treatment theory on research conducted at the University of Toronto which suggested that playing video games led to heightened visual attention. Also, researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Minnesota in 2010 asserted that similar visual games could be used to train some individuals to make decisions faster.

Several critical challenges for developers remain open to question. Namely, will the video game treatment therapy actually produce a kind of attention that is useful and applicable to improving the lives of ADHD sufferers? Furthermore, if that particular kind of attention that is fostered by playing video games is useful, will the treatment create a sustained positive effect on the individual without intruding on other life activities?

Thus, it seems the time-honored question of concerned middle-class parents across America remains: Could video games, or in this case the video game "treatment," simply develop into yet another distraction?

Several large drug companies have recently cut funding for research and development on brain disorders even as some brain disorders currently have no readily available treatments.

The National Institutes of Mental Health estimate that approximately 25% of adults may have one or more mental illnesses, which includes at least five million Americans currently living with brain disorders such as Alzheimer's.

The rationale behind reductions in research funding seems to have less to do with verifiable consumer demand and more to do with profit margins. Some scientists and researchers believe that drug companies are deterred by the high cost of bringing neurological medicine to market and the extensive regulatory hurdles set in place by the FDA.

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