Does mindfulness meditation work for highly inattentive individuals? Mindfulness practice requires extensive concentration for a prolonged period of time (e.g., attending to breath/body sensation for above 5 minutes).  It is reasonable to assume that it might be challenging for people who are highly inattentive. However, mindfulness has been used as a health intervention for individuals with ADHD (with inattention as a symptom).

One recent review with 9 studies (Lee et al., 2017) found that mindfulness is effective for adults with ADHD, yet it is


  unclear whether mindfulness-based intervention is effective for children and adolescence with ADHD due to limited studies available and the limitations of the study design in the reviewed studies.


What are the recent mindfulness studies involving children with ADHD? And is there any research on people with inattention only?

References

Lee, C. S., Ma, M. T., Ho, H. Y., Tsang, K. K., Zheng, Y. Y., &amp; Wu, Z. Y. (2017). The effectiveness of mindfulness-based intervention in attention on individuals with ADHD: A systematic review. Hong Kong Journal of Occupational Therapy, 30, 33-41. doi: 10.1016/j.hkjot.2017.05.001
The most up-to-date research I can find at the moment specifically looking at children with ADHD is a systematic review and meta-analysis by Chimiklis et al (2018), and they point out that yoga, mindfulness and meditation should not be considered first-line interventions for ADHD but may help and more research is needed.

Considerable risk for bias was found across studies. Given significant methodological limitations of the literature, positive effect sizes found in studies should be interpreted with caution; these interventions should not be considered first-line interventions for ADHD. However, preliminary findings suggest yoga, mindfulness, and meditation may be beneficial for youth with ADHD, but extensive research is required to validate the efficacy of these interventions.

References
Chimiklis, A. L., Dahl, V., Spears, A. P., Goss, K., Fogarty, K., &amp; Chacko, A. (2018). Yoga, mindfulness, and meditation interventions for youth with ADHD: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 1-14. 10.1007/s10826-018-1148-7