ADHD Medications May Not Improve Attention, Study Suggests

Epoch Times ^ | 02/06/2026 | Rachel Ann T. Melegrito

[SeekAndFind]

Study of nearly 6,000 children shows Ritalin and Adderall activate the brain’s reward centers rather than attention networks, challenging long-held beliefs.

For decades, doctors believed attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medications like Ritalin and Adderall worked by sharpening a person’s focus. They may have been wrong.

A study suggests these drugs actually work by making tasks feel more rewarding—basically tricking the brain into caring about homework, chores, and other mundane activities.

“Essentially, we found that stimulants pre-reward our brains and allow us to keep working at things that wouldn’t normally hold our interest—like our least favorite class in school,” Dr. Nico Dosenbach, senior author of the study and the David M. & Tracy S. Holtzman professor of neurology, said in a news release.

Rewarding Enough to Focus

The study, published in Cell and led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, analyzed brain scans of nearly 6,000 children ages 8 to 11. They compared scans from 337 children who took stimulant medications on the day of their scan with scans from children who did not.

Rather than sharpening attention itself, stimulants appear to help people with ADHD feel more awake, care more about a task, and stick with it by affecting other brain regions.

Children who took stimulants had increased brain connectivity linked to wakefulness and reward. However, there was no change to the brain’s attention networks.

To validate their findings, researchers gave five healthy adults with ADHD who don’t take medication 40 milligrams of Ritalin, a type of stimulant, and scanned their brains before and after. The results matched: The medications activated the brain’s arousal and reward centers, not its attention centers.

Rethinking Hyperactivity

The findings suggest that hyperactivity in ADHD may be less about “too much movement” and more about searching for something more rewarding to do. The researchers hypothesize that stimulants reduce the urge to leave one task for another by making tasks feel more worthwhile.

“Whatever kids can’t focus on—those tasks that make them fidgety—are tasks that they find unrewarding. On a stimulant, they can sit still better because they’re not getting up to find something better to do,” Dosenbach said.

The findings align with what pharmacologists already understood about these medications, even if the popular narrative hasn’t caught up, Dr. Andrea Diaz Stransky, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and advisor for Emora Health, who was not involved in the study, told The Epoch Times.

She added that the idea of stimulants as attention-enhancing persists in neuroradiology and in lay circles, even if pharmacology doesn’t fully support it.

“We think of stimulants as basically ’turning up the volume‘ of the reward system, so that folks who cannot control their attention can use that ’extra sense of reward' towards the things that are hard to focus on,” Stransky said.

Stransky noted that some people without ADHD can pay attention just fine but struggle to feel motivated to get started on tasks. “We use stimulants as ‘augmenting agents’ for antidepressants in these cases,” she added.

The Sleep Connection

Researchers found that stimulant medications may partially offset the penalties of lost sleep.

In children with ADHD and in children without ADHD who were not sleeping sufficiently, taking stimulants was linked to better alertness and cognitive performance.

However, for children without ADHD who were getting adequate sleep, taking stimulants was not linked to improved academics or cognitive performance.

Parents reported how many hours of sleep their children typically got on most nights, which researchers used as a surrogate measure of arousal or how well-rested the children were at the time of scanning.

On brain scans, well-rested children showed similar brain activity to children taking stimulants, with both shifting the brain toward a more alert, wakeful state.

Loss of sleep may mimic ADHD symptoms, increasing the risk of misdiagnosis. At the same time, sleep disturbance and ADHD symptoms can reinforce each other.

As a result, some children who display ADHD symptoms and respond to stimulants may not have ADHD but instead may be suffering from insufficient sleep.

The overlap between sleep and stimulant effects may also help explain why some adolescents with ADHD turn to caffeine as a form of self-medication, Stransky noted, although she added that the two substances work differently.

Safety Considerations

Because stimulants work by acting on the reward system, they carry potential for abuse. Prescription stimulants are currently classified as Schedule II substances, meaning they can be dispensed only with a prescription.

In routine ADHD care, however, stimulants are prescribed at low, carefully monitored doses, and evidence suggests a low risk of addiction or lasting dependence when they are used as directed.

Drug labels warn that abruptly discontinuing stimulants after prolonged high-dose use—most often in the context of misuse or abuse—can lead to withdrawal symptoms such as low energy and depressed mood.

Addiction risk is most likely in people who use stimulants nonmedically or at high doses, not in children with ADHD who take medication as prescribed.

Long-term studies suggest that children with ADHD rarely develop addiction to their prescribed medication when it is used as directed, and that such treatment may even protect against substance abuse.

---

TOPICS: Health/Medicine; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: adhd; attention; drugs; medications

[Celtic Conservative]

So what they’re saying is that it still works, just not in the way that they thought it did.

CC

[Ex-Con777]

It wasn’t intended to increase alertness. It was intended to help babysit restless little boys that were just being boys. IMO

EC

[cnsmom]

I believe it was just Big Pharma using children to make money. Now that most of the children born in the 90’s have aged out of needing to believe the lie they chose to go off the meds as high functioning adults.Big Pharma had COVID to profit from and fill a gap for awhile because the trans crazeand those harmful drugs didn’t appeal to many parents. Their real target is now the elderly so beware.

[maddog55]

ADHD.... Where big pharma and psychologist drug kids being normal.

[trebb]

They’re spinning it now that they discovered they’ve been drugging children to make them more docile without actually making them more effective...if I was going to school these days (instead of the 50s and 60s), I’d have been “diagnosed” with ADHD - but I had to learn to cope with it. Even today, at 73, my attention can wander as I look around (makes ignoring idiotic commercials on TV easy), so, if I want to concentrate on something being said, I have to close my eyes to remove the visual distractions - had to do it during college classes too and some professors thought I was sleeping or ignoring them p- but I got my degree with a 4.0 GPA.

[AppyPappy]

Now do caffeine. It is basically the same thing.

[Celtic Conservative]

I was 35 when I got diagnosed. By that time I had graduated high school, college and 2 police academies. I was a deans list student, and graduated in the top ten of both academies so I’d obviously learned some coping skills. I tried stimulant medications for awhile. They helped with the attention span, but pushed my anxiety up. Being in law enforcement I had enough anxiety, thank you very much. I quit taking them and my career progressed just fine.

CC

[dfwgator]

I tried to read this but I got distracted after the first paragraph.

[packagingguy]

Going outside and getting exercise raises dopamine, the neurotransmitter implicated in ADHD.

Around 1994-1995 kids stopped going outside. The ones with a predisposition to ADHD weren’t getting a dopamine boost by doing normal kid things.

If you look at when ADHD rates took off it was 1995.

That’s just my hypothesis, but it seems reasonable and aligns with parents’ observations.

[philman_36]

Adderall is a brand-name medication containing a combination of four amphetamine salts (dextroamphetamine and levoamphetamine). Adderall used to be a weight control drug called Obetrol...
When Richwood acquired Rexar, the drug's name was changed from Obetrol to Adderall. Methylphenidate (Ritalin), a psychostimulant used in the treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, has pharmacological effects similar to cocaine and amphetamine. Kids don't need a drug dealer, they just need to be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD.

[kawhill]

“A study suggests these drugs actually work by making tasks feel more rewarding—basically tricking the brain into caring about homework, chores, and other mundane activities.” Things got to get done.

[Tired of Taxes]

Remember, 20-30 years ago, many of us were alarmed by the push to diagnose children and put more and more of them on drugs. Now, children are tricked into believing they’re the opposite sex and given hormone treatments and surgery. It’s all madness.

[trebb]

That is all true. Then there’s kids with active minds - when I was in 5th grade, a friend was doing very poorly in school and folks thought he was dumb - then his parents finally got around to having him checked/tested...the next year he was in a special school and taking 10th-12th grade courses and acing them...turns out he was so smart he was bored to death in regular school.