The role of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity in the fine motor coordination in children with ADHD

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Abstract

Objective

Deficits in fine motor coordination have been suggested to be associated with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, despite the negative impact of poor fine motor skills on academic achievement, researchers have paid little attention to this problem. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between ADHD dimensions and fine motor performance.

Method

Participants were 43 children with a diagnosis of ADHD aged between 7 and 14 years (M = 9.61; 81% male) and 42 typically developing (TP) children in the same age range (M = 10.76; 75.2% male).

Results

Children with ADHD performed worse than TP on all tasks (δ Fine_motor_tasks, −0.19 to −0.44). After controlling for age and ADHD-HY (hyperactivity/impulsivity), higher scores on ADHD-IN (inattentiveness) predicted a larger number of mistakes among all psychomotricity tasks and conditions (β 0.39–0.58, ps < 0.05).

Conclusion

The ADHD group showed poorer fine motor performance than controls across all fine motor coordination tasks. However, lower performance (more mistakes), was related to the inattention dimension but not to the hyperactivity/impulsivity dimensions. Authors recommend including training and enhancement of the fine motor skills for more comprehensive ADHD treatment.

Section snippets

What this paper adds?

  • 1.

    This study provides empirical evidence for the hypothesis that children with ADHD have a poorer fine motor performance than children with typical development.

  • 2.

    The handwriting of the ADHD children is characterized by a less accurate line drawing, meaning more mistakes.

  • 3.

    Our results suggest that the fine motor coordination is related to the inattention dimension but not to the hyperactivity/impulsivity dimensions. Therefore, these difficulties would affect both clinical subtypes of ADHD

Participants

Participants were forty-three children with a diagnosis of ADHD aged between 7 and 14 years (M = 9.61; SD = 2.20; 81% male) and forty-two typically developing (TP) children in the same age range (M = 10.76; SD = 2.56; 75.2% male). ADHD cases were recruited from children's mental health centers. Exclusion criteria for the clinical group included a comorbid diagnosis of autism, epilepsy, psychotic disorders, intellectual disability, brain disorders or any medical disorder associated with externalizing

Fine psychomotricity performance comparison between groups

With the exception of the Series task variables, the remaining dependent variables were normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test p > 0.05) and showed similar variance in ADHD children and controls (Levene’s test p > 0.05). In such cases, parametric or non-parametric analyses were applied accordingly. Neither age nor gender differences between groups were found.

A Mann–Whitney U test was conducted to assess the performance differences between the control and the clinical groups (Table 1).

Discussion

According to previous studies and our current findings, children diagnosed with ADHD show poorer handwriting ability on average than controls. Children with ADHD would be less accurate in line tracing than controls; however, this imprecision is not related to the hyperactivity/impulsivity dimension but is instead related to the inattention dimension. These results contrast with those reported by Noda et al. (2013). The authors found that inattention and fine motor skills were related to writing

Conclusion

In summary, this study provides empirical evidence for the hypothesis that children with ADHD have a poorer fine motor performance than children with typical development. The performance of the ADHD children is characterized by a less accurate line drawing, meaning more mistakes, which is related to the inattention dimension but not to the hyperactivity or impulsivity dimensions. This result suggests that fine motor difficulties would affect both clinical subtypes of ADHD (predominantly

Conflict of interest statement

The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

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    This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project PSI2014-53427-P) and Fundación Séneca (project 19267/PI/14).

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