Original articleGender effects on Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity disorder in adults, revisited
Section snippets
Methods and materials
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder subjects were adults clinically referred for treatment to a psychiatric outpatient facility at a large urban hospital from September of 1993 to February of 1999. This study did not include any of the subjects analyzed in our prior report of adult ADHD (Biederman et al 1994) evaluated in the early 1990s. Control subjects were nonreferred parents of non-ADHD proband children from two identically designed family genetic case-control studies of ADHD (
Demographic characteristics of sample
The ADHD sample consisted of 219 subjects (82 female subjects, 137 male subjects), with a mean age of 37.6 ± 10.5. The control sample consisted of 215 subjects (81 female subjects, 134 male subjects), with a mean age of 38.7 ± 4.2. There were no significant differences between the ADHD and control groups in gender (Pearson χ21 = .003, p = .96) or age (t432 = 1.37, p = .17). Thus, the matching procedure succeeded in balancing the groups on these potentially confounding factors. The ratio of male
Discussion
This study reexamined gender differences in a new, large sample of male and female adults with and without ADHD evaluated over the last 7 years. Interaction models provided no evidence that gender moderated the association between ADHD and the phenotypic expression of the disorder, the prevalence of lifetime or current comorbid psychiatric disorders, or patterns of cognitive and psychosocial functioning. These results are remarkably consistent with previous findings reported in adults with
Acknowledgements
This work was supported, in part, by Grants from United States Public Health Service (National Institute of Mental Health), Grant RO1 MH-41314-01A2 (JB) and RO1 MH 57934 (SVF). Parts of this work were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, May 2002, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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