Executive Function Impairments in High IQ Adults with ADHD.
The study shows that extremely bright adults can suffer from ADHD in ways that seriously interfere with their higher education and/or employment. The study highlights impairments of working memory, processing speed, and a variety of other executive functions that can be assessed with standardized measures. It also notes that many of these high IQ adults did not show significant ADHD impairments until they got into high school or college.
This study demonstrates that adults with high IQ can fully meet DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for ADHD and that they tend to suffer significant impairments on executive functions measured by three standardized tests and five separate clusters of a normed self-report scale. Results of this study are fully consistent with findings from another study, currently in review, that used similar measures with a sample of 117 children and adolescents with high IQ and ADHD. Another strength is that our data include reports of percentages of subjects who scored above or below the
stipulated score cut-points. This provides information that may be more useful to clinicians assessing individual patients than would be group means which may submerge individual differences.
Thomas E. Brown, Philipp C. Reichel, and Donald M. Quinlan in Journal of Attention Disorders. (2009) 13 (2) 161-167. Thomas E. Brown, Philipp C. Reichel, and Donald M. Quinlan in Journal of Attention Disorders. (2009) 13 (2) 161-167.
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