Neuropsychological Functions among Adolescents with Persistent and Non-Persistent Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Lin, Yu-Ju
Abstract
Objective: ADHD has been found to have various neuropsychological deficits across life span and no single deficit was found to explain the whole picture of ADHD. Children and adolescents with ADHD may have age-dependent decline in symptoms and half of them will not meet the diagnostic criteria as they grow up. There was no consistent finding in the relationship between the disease status of ADHD and neuropsychological functions, which change with age during childhood and adolescence. Our study aimed to evaluate the neuropsychological functions in adolescents with persistent and non-persistent ADHD.
Methods: We recruited 459 adolescents, aged 11-19, who were clinically diagnosed with ADHD 4 to 5 years before the implementation of this study and 280 comparison adolescents without ADHD. All participants were interviewed by the Chinese K-SADS-E to confirm their previous and current ADHD status and other psychiatric diagnoses, and received neuropsychological tests including intelligent quotient (IQ) and Cambridge Neuropsychological testing automated battery (CANTAB). ADHD was considered persistent if the adolescents with childhood diagnosis of ADHD met full diagnostic criteria for DSM-IV ADHD at ascertainment and non-persistent if the adolescents with childhood diagnosis of ADHD no longer met the full diagnostic criteria.
Results: Adolescents with persistent ADHD (68.6%) were slightly younger than patients without persistent ADHD (31.4%) and the controls. The controls had higher full-scale IQ and more digits recalled backward than the two ADHD groups. The univariate analyses revealed that both persistent and non-persistent ADHD groups performed significantly worse than the controls in most modalities of the CANTAB and showed a linear trend in the order of persistent ADHD, non-persistent ADHD, and the controls. After adjusting for age, sex, full-scale IQ and any psychiatric comorbidity, regardless of current ADHD diagnosis, the adolescents with ADHD performed worse in spatial span, spatial working memory, visual recognition memory, reaction time and signal detectability than the controls. Set-shifting was not impaired in neither persistent nor persistent ADHD. Response inhibition and the EF tasks with lower difficulties were only impaired in current ADHD. Older adolescents had better performance than younger ones in all three groups in majority of neuropsychological tasks.
Conclusion: The findings suggest that adolescents with ADHD continue to suffer from neuropsychological deficits when they grow up, and some deficits may disappear with symptoms and age while several may persist. Our study provides strong evidence that spatial working memory is a stable trait of ADHD regardless of the ADHD status throughout adolescence.
Subjects
Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
adolescent
neuropsychological tests
age factors
Type
thesis
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