Your health: Video games can help kids with ADHD
Video games help kids with ADHD
Children with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) show signs of improvement after playing a videogame for 30 minutes a day rather than taking a pill, the U.S. company developing the treatment says.
Diagnoses for ADHD have risen in recent decades, and some 9.5 percent of children aged 3-17 in the United States had the condition in 2012, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Children in the pilot study - 80 aged between 8 and 12, half of which had ADHD - showed improved working memory and levels of attention, and some parent ratings of symptoms also rose, according to the results presented at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's 62nd annual meeting.
The company, Akili Interactive Labs, said it would now "move full steam ahead" into a full randomized trial, that if successful would support a filing with the FDA, Reuters reports.
Medical websites targeted by malware
It's never been more dangerous to visit a healthcare-related website, International Business Times reports.
From insurance companies to self-help websites, hackers launched more attacks on the health industry than any other over the first half of 2015.
That's according to a recent report published by G Data, the German cybersecurity company that regularly tracks cybercrime. This report, the first of two scheduled on malicious software activity in 2015, determined that 26.6 percent of all malware attacks were aimed at health sites.
Compare that to 10.2 percent in the second half of 2014 and 6.5 percent in the first half of 2014.
"It could be insurance fraud," said Andy Hayter, security evangelist at G Data, when asked about the possible motivation for the attacks. "This means people are hacking websites so that when you go there, you're actually being redirected to a key logger or something that's collecting information on you. … Healthcare websites are becoming more evil in the past year than they ever have before."
Data previously obtained by International Business Times proved that U.S. patients' healthcare information is among the most likely to be compromised in a data breach. A data breach is twice as likely to happen to healthcare sites as to sites that hold financial data.