Attention as neurocognitive endophenotype of ADHD across the life span: a family study.

Attention as neurocognitive endophenotype of ADHD across the life span: a family study. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2019 May 08;: Authors: Boxhoorn S, Lopez E, Schmidt C, Schulze D, Hänig S, Cholemkery H, Freitag CM Abstract Endophenotypes mediate pathways between genetic variations and the psychiatric phenotype, or share genetic risk with the psychiatric phenotype. Identifying endophenotypes is an important step to unravel disease pathways underlying complex psychiatric phenotypes such as ADHD. Potential viable endophenotypes for ADHD across the lifespan are neurocognitive measures of basic attention functions, such as sustained attention, and executive attention functions (EF), such as inhibition. The present study evaluated the endophenotype criteria of familiality and state-independency for measures of basic attention and EF in affected- and unaffected parents of children with ADHD (N = 139), and typically developing children (N = 60). In addition, the added value of neurocognitive measures relative to questionnaire data in genetically informed designs was explored by comparing the intergenerational transmission of neurocognitive measures to those of ADHD symptom scores. Results revealed small-to-medium-sized familial effects of ADHD for reaction time measures of EF components and state-independency given familial effects. Parent-child correlations as estimates of intergenerational transmission of those neurocogni...
Source: European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci Source Type: research