Altered functional networks in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been frequently reported, but effective connectivity has hardly been studied. Especially the differences of effective connectivity in children with ADHD after receiving neurofeedback (NF) training have been merely reported. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the effective networks of ADHD and the positive influence of NF on the effective networks. Electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded from 22 children with ADHD (including data from children pretraining and posttraining) and 15 age-matched healthy controls during an eyes-closed resting state. Phase transfer entropy (PTE) was used to construct the effective connectivity. The topological properties of networks and flow gain were measured separately in four bands (delta, theta, alpha, and beta). Results revealed the following: pretraining children with ADHD manifested a higher clustering coefficient and lower characteristic path length in the delta band than healthy controls; weakened anterior-to-posterior flow gain in the delta band, strengthened posterior-to-anterior flow gain in the alpha band and strengthened anterior-to-posterior flow gain in the beta band were observed in pretraining children with ADHD; The topological properties and flow gain in posttraining children with ADHD were close to those of healthy controls. Moreover, parent’s SWAN presented significant improvements of ADHD symptoms after NF. Our findings revealed that the effective connectivity of ADHD was altered and that NF could improve the brain function of ADHD. The present study provided the first evidence that children with ADHD differed from healthy children in phase-based effective connectivity and that NF could reduce the differences.

注意力缺陷/多动障碍（ADHD）中功能网络的改变已被频繁报道，但是有效的连通性却鲜有研究。特别是，仅报道了接受神经反馈（NF）训练后的多动症儿童有效连接能力的差异。因此，本研究旨在探讨ADHD的有效网络以及NF对有效网络的积极影响。在闭眼休息状态下，记录了22名ADHD儿童的脑电图（EEG）数据（包括来自训练前和训练后儿童的数据）和15个与年龄匹配的健康对照。相转移熵（PTE）用于构建有效的连通性。网络的拓扑特性和流量增益分别在四个波段（δ，θ，α和β）中测量。结果表明：与健康对照组相比，多动症预训练儿童在三角洲带表现出更高的聚类系数和更低的特征路径长度。在多动症预训练儿童中，观察到了三角带中前后血流的减弱，α带中前后血流的增强，以及β带中前后血流的增强。经过训练的多动症患儿的拓扑学特性和血流增加与健康对照组的接近。此外，父母的SWAN改善了NF后ADHD症状。我们的发现表明，ADHD的有效连接性发生了改变，NF可以改善ADHD的脑功能。