ADHD severity as a predictor of cognitive task performance in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Rosleen Mansour, Anthony R Ward, David M Lane and 5 others
PMID 33548744WHAT IT FOUND
In children with autism, higher parent-reported ADHD symptom severity was linked to poorer performance on attention and memory tasks.
Autism symptom severity was not linked to these tasks. The study cannot show cause.
Key findings
01Among 92 children with autism, greater parent-reported ADHD symptom severity was associated with more commission errors on the continuous performance attention task, while autism symptom severity was not.
02ADHD severity was also associated with more errors on the matching familiar figures task and worse accuracy on stop-signal go trials, but autism severity did not predict these outcomes.
03ADHD severity predicted slower response time on the delayed match-to-sample memory task, while autism severity did not, and neither predicted accuracy on that task.
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot show that ADHD symptoms caused poorer cognitive task performance or that treating ADHD would change performance. 86% of the sample met criteria for comorbid ADHD, so it says little about children with autism who have low ADHD symptom severity. The sample had a mean full-scale IQ of 84 and excluded IQ below 40, so results may not apply to children with more severe intellectual disability. Forty-seven children were taking psychoactive medication at study entry, and only psychostimulants were stopped two days before testing, so medication effects on attention and memory could not be ruled out. The analysis looked at many cognitive outcomes and did not test ADHD presentations or other psychiatric conditions because of limited power.
Declared interests
The sample came from a larger NIH-funded study. The paper does not report author conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that reducing ADHD symptoms will improve cognitive task performance or daily functioning. This study was cross-sectional and did not test treatment, so it cannot show that ADHD symptoms caused the task differences.