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Adoptive and Biological Families of Children and Adolescents With ADHD

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ABSTRACT

Objective

Using an adoption study design, the authors addressed the issue of genetics in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Method

This study examined the rates of ADHD and associated disorders in the first-degree adoptive relatives of 25 adopted probands with ADHD and compared them with those of the first-degree biological relatives of 101 nonadopted probands with ADHD and 50 nonadopted, non-ADHD control probands.

Results

Six percent of the adoptive parents of adopted ADHD probands had ADHD compared with 18% of the biological parents of nonadopted ADHD probands and 3% of the biological parents of the control probands.

Conclusion

Results of this study lend support to the hypothesis that ADHD has a genetic component.

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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  • Cited by (0)

    These data were collected as part of the first author's doctoral dissertation at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

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