The effect of Adderall (general) on the weight loss of teens

The goal of the research experiment is to study the effect of Adderall (general) on the weight loss of teens. Adderall is a psychostimulant based on amphetamine salts, which is used for treating narcolepsy and ADHD. It is also often used by healthy individuals to improve concentration Adderall also has been used for managing treatment-resistance depression and obesity. A measure of obesity is Body Mass Index (weight in kg divided by square of height in meters). Overweight people have BMI over 25, and BMI of obese people is 30 or greater.

The number of participants for the study to be reliable is expected to be 300 persons or more. Volunteer participants can be found through newspaper advertisements. Age of participants is expected to be within 14-18 years, equal number of male and female respondents will be selected by random sampling from the total group of obese or overweight volunteers. 150 male and 150 female respondents will be divided into groups of 50 participants using random selection. Overall, there will be two experimental and one control group consisting of 100 persons each (with 50-50 distribution of make and female participants). All participants should not have ADHD or narcolepsy, to avoid confounding factors, and should not have individual oversensitivity to the components of Adderall. The participants should not have heart problems as well.

Experimental groups will receive a certain dosage of Adderall: 5 mg twice per day for group 1, and 10 mg twice per day for group 2. Control group will not receive Adderall. It is optimal to incorporate the use of Adderall into everyday life of the participants so that they would not know to which group they belong to. Independent variable in this experiment is Adderall dosage, and dependent variable is body mass index (BMI). The measurements of BMI are to be made before the start of the experiment, and weekly since the start of the experiment. Expected duration of the experiment ”“ one month. The hypothesis is that Adderall will help the participants to lose weight, and that weight loss will be higher in group 2, where the dosage of Adderall is higher.

There are several confounding factors, the main of them being different nutrition, level of physical exercise and possibly the level of stress. The best way to control them is to place the participants into homogeneous environment (e.g. a summer camp or school practice), where the level of physical activity and diet will be the same for all participants.