PBHM Workshop: Rob Whelan

PBHM Investigator, Robert Whelan, will present “Predicting who will respond to stimulant medication in ADHD: A precision medicine approach using neurally informed computational models”. In this workshop, Rob will present the outline of a project that will start in March 2022. The goal of this project is use precision medicine to improve treatment of childhood Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Methylphenidate is the first-line pharmacological treatment but there is wide individual variation in outcomes: 30% of children will have no clinically meaningful response. There is currently no validated objective, quantitative method for predicting who will ultimately respond. Together with co-PI Jane McGrath, and industry collaborators, Cumulus Neuroscience, this project will use neurally informed computational models derived from behaviour and electroencephalography to decompose medication effects on distinct neural mechanisms in a large cohort of medication naive patients ages 10-14 years. Interrogating this immense amount of data will be solved by using computational model parameters as inputs into machine learning algorithms. The aim will be to identify neurocognitive processes predicting who will respond clinically to methylphenidate.