Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesThought Disorder in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Section snippets
SUBJECTS
The study included 115 children with ADHD, 88 children with schizophrenia, and 190 normal children (Table 1). The thought disorder findings of the schizophrenic and normal children have been published (Caplan et al., 2000). As shown in Table 1, the children with schizophrenia had significantly lower IQ scores than the normal children. Furthermore, the ADHD group included more white children but fewer Asian and African-American children than did the normal group. The schizophrenic group had
Between-Group Differences
The loose associations scores of the children with ADHD (mean = 0.008, SD = 0.02) and normal children (mean = 0.002, SD = 0.01) were significantly lower than those of the schizophrenic children (mean = 0.07, SD = 0.14). Table 2 shows pairwise comparisons of the other thought disorder scores among the ADHD, normal, and schizophrenic groups at each of the chosen IQ levels. The comparisons used Z scores derived from the estimated means and standard errors.
ADHD Versus Normal. At all three IQ
DISCUSSION
This study demonstrates that, above and beyond differences in IQ, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, children with ADHD have poorly organized thoughts (i.e., increased use of illogical thinking, exophora) and impaired use of cohesive devices (i.e., decreased use of conjunctions, increased use of lexical cohesion) to connect ideas across sentences compared with normal children. Children with ADHD have a narrower range (i.e., no loose associations, referential cohesion,
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Cited by (0)
This study was supported by grants MH-00538 (R.C.) and MH-45114 (R.F.A.). The authors appreciate the assistance of Amy Mo, Natasha Wheeler, Psy.D., Mathias Mendez, and Nancy O'shea.