Equine-Assisted Activities and Therapy for Treating Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

This study is designed as a 12-week, prospective, open labeled trial, including 24 sessions of EAA/T. Forty six subjects will be aasigned 12 weeks of EAA/T or drug therapy, and various clinical tests will be administered at baseline and after EAA/T or drug therapy. Assessments included the investigator-administered ADHD-Rating Scale (ARS-I), Clinical Global Impressions - Severity scale (CGI-S), Clinical Global Impressions - Improvement scale (CGI-I), Gordon Diagnostic System (GDS), Korea-Child Behavior Checklist (K-CBCL), Self-Esteem Scale (SES), Bruininks-Oseretsky test of motor proficiency, second edition (BOT-2), and quantitative electroencephalography (QEEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) study. This study has two objectives. The first objective is to investigate clinical effects of equine-assisted activities and therapy (EAA/T) for treating attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For this one, we determine the treatment response rate as the primary outcome measure. The treatment response is defined as ≥ 30% decline than baseline in the ARS-I score or in CGI-I scores of 1 or 2 to endpoint. The second objective is to compare the clinical effect of EAA/T and drug therapy in children with ADHD.