Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESGenetic Contributions to the Development of ADHD Subtypes From Childhood to Adolescence
Section snippets
Sample
This study is based on data from the Twin Study of Child and Adolescent Development, a longitudinal study concerning health and behavior in children and adolescents (Larsson et al., in press). Briefly, twins were eligible for participation if they were alive and lived in Sweden and were born between May 1985 and December 1986. The twins and their parents have been contacted in three different waves: Wave 1 was in 1994 (the twins were 8-9 years old), wave 2 was in 1999 (the twins were 13-14
Descriptive Statistics
Mean symptom scores in the hyperactive-impulsive and inattentive scales, SDs, and sample sizes for twins that have parental report from at least one of the three waves are shown in Table 1. Hyperactivity-impulsivity scores were significantly lower in girls than in boys at ages 8 to 9 and 13 to 14, but not at age 16 to 17 (age 8-9: t2,013 = 2.97, p < .001; age 13-14: t1,955 = 2.49, p < .001; and age 16-17: t2,005 = −1.34, p = .18). Inattention scores were consistently lower in girls than in boys
DISCUSSION
Our main results show that persistent genetic influences have an important role in the development of ADHD subtypes from childhood to adolescence. We found one common genetic component (i.e., persistent cross-subtype influences) influencing hyperactivity-impulsivity and inattention over time, which could be interpreted as persistent genetic influences on ADHD of the combined type. These results are broadly consistent with results from one previous longitudinal twin study (Nadder et al., 2002)
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Cited by (0)
This study was funded by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (project 2001-2368) and the Swedish Research Council (2001-4231).
Article Plus (online only) materials for this article appear on the Journal's Web site: www.jaacap.com.
Disclosure: The authors have no financial relationships to disclose.