ACEs and ADHDAdverse Childhood Experiences and ADHD Diagnosis at Age 9 Years in a National Urban Sample
Section snippets
Study Design and Data Source
We conducted a secondary analysis of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) birth cohort. The FFCWS cohort consists of nearly 5000 children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large US cities.21 Most children in the study were born to unmarried parents by design. This longitudinal data set includes postpartum (baseline) and follow-up interviews with mothers with children at ages 1, 3, 5, and 9 years. A more detailed description of the study design and methods, including
Study Sample
The study sample included 1572 children. Baseline demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the study sample are summarized in Table 1 along with corresponding measures for respondents who participated in the FFCWS but were not included in the study sample. There were no statistically significant differences between these groups. Nearly half of the children included in the study sample were African American, one-quarter were Latino, and 69% were born to unmarried parents. Only 4% of the
Discussion
In a national US urban sample, we found that experiencing ACEs before age 5 years and experiencing ACEs between age 5 and 9 years were both associated with parent-reported ADHD diagnosis at age 9 years. Even after controlling for ACEs occurring before age 5 years and other potential confounders, including ADHD diagnosis at age 5 years, we found that ACEs occurring during middle childhood were significantly associated with parent-reported ADHD at age 9 years. These findings add to the growing
Acknowledgments
Financial disclosure: Dr Jimenez is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program. The project described was supported in part by Award Numbers R25HD074544, P2CHD058486, and 5R01HD036916 awarded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child
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2022, Social Science ResearchCitation Excerpt :For example, Zeng et al. (2019) found that exposure to each additional ACE increased the likelihood of being suspended or expelled from preschool by 80%. Other studies have shown that children who experience multiple types of ACEs are more likely to report absenteeism (Blodgett and Lanigan, 2018; Crouch et al., 2019; Ramirez et al., 2012; Stempel et al., 2017), repeat a grade in school (Bettencourt et al., 2018; McKelvey et al., 2018; Crouch et al., 2019), suffer from attention problems (Jimenez et al., 2016, 2017), bring a weapon to school (Forster et al., 2020), and perpetrate violence against other children (Lansford et al., 2002; Ray et al., 2020). While researchers have established a link between ACEs and behavioral problems in school there are several notable limitations.
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2021, Sleep MedicineCitation Excerpt :Adverse childhood experiences are often assessed retrospectively in adulthood, reflecting lifetime exposure to adversity. Although ACEs assessed in adulthood have demonstrated robust associations with adult health outcomes [7], recent investigations have focused on assessing ACEs occurring in childhood and adolescence [14,15]. These efforts to assess ACEs may not cover the child's lifetime exposure and may rely on parent reports of children's adversity, yet they allow for examination of shorter term consequences of ACEs.
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The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.