Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesAdoptive and Biological Families of Children and Adolescents With ADHD
Section snippets
METHOD
The adopted sample consisted of 25 white children of both genders in whom DSM-III-R ADHD had been diagnosed, between the ages of 5 and 18 years, adopted within the first year of life by a family of the same cultural background (“adopted ADHD”) and their 62 first-degree adoptive relatives. The adopted ADHD group included 50 parents and 12 siblings. We included in the statistical analyses only siblings who were full biological children of the adoptive parents. Subjects were recruited from
RESULTS
The demographic characteristics of the 3 groups of probands can be seen in Table 1. There were no significant differences in the mean age, mean SES of the family, percentage of intact families, or percentage of females in each group. As noted above, because only siblings who were full biological children of the adoptive parents were included in these analyses, the number of siblings of adopted probands was quite small. Thus we analyzed the data for parents and siblings separately.
As depicted in
DISCUSSION
In a family study of adopted children with ADHD, we found that the rate of ADHD in adoptive parents of adoptees with ADHD was low and indistinguishable from the rate found in parents of non-ADHD controls and that both were significantly lower than the rate of ADHD in parents of the biological ADHD children. These results confirm our study hypothesis and indicate that there is no increased risk for ADHD among adoptive parents of adopted ADHD probands.
Our findings pertaining to the absence of
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These data were collected as part of the first author's doctoral dissertation at the University at Albany, State University of New York.