Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESA Meta-Analysis of Working Memory Impairments in Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Section snippets
METHOD
A literature search was conducted to identify published studies in which WM was assessed in children and adolescents with ADHD. Medline and PsycINFO were searched from 1997 to December 2003 (subsequent to a previous review by Pennington and Ozonoff [1996]) using combinations of the specific MeSH terms (ADHD, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity) with the keywords (WM, verbal span, spatial span, short-term memory, phonological loop, visual-spatial sketchpad, digit span). The reference lists
Study Characteristics
Thirty-two studies were located, but only 26 studies met our inclusion criteria. (An appendix containing the descriptive characteristics of the studies is available on the Journal's Web Site at www.jaacap.com via the ArticlePlus feature). The majority of the studies focused on children younger than the age of 13 years, with only six studies examining WM processes in adolescents. Diagnostic criteria varied considerably across the studies within each WM domain. Overall, 15 of the 26 studies used
DISCUSSION
One of the advantages of meta-analysis is that it permits the pooling of results across studies and thus provides greater power to detect group differences. Overall, the findings suggest that WM processes are impaired in children with ADHD. Specifically, marked reductions in performance relative to normal controls were found for both the spatial storage and spatial CE WM components. In contrast, modest deficits were found for verbal storage and verbal CE WM domains. There are several possible
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This research was funded by a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Fellowship (Ms. Martinussen), a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship (Dr. Hayden), and a CIHR operating grant (Dr. Tannock).
Article Plus (online only) materials for this article appear on the Journal's Web site: www.jaacap.com.
Correspondence to Dr. Rosemary Tannock, Brain and Behavior Research, The Hospital for Sick Children, 555 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5G 1X8; e-mail: [email protected].
Disclosure: Dr. Tannock has received research funding from, is a consultant for, and is on the speaker's bureau for Eli Lilly. She is also on the advisory board for Shire and has received funding (for placebo control) from Novartis. The other authors have no financial relationships to disclose.