Diagnosing attention disorders with measures of neurocognitive functioning

The validity of the Differential Ability Scales (DAS; Elliott, 1990) in predicting attention disorders in school-aged children was examined. The participants were 40 children diagnosed with attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 40 normal children between 7 and 12 years of age. Comorbidity was controlled by excluding children with ADHD who had a concurrent DSM-IV diagnosis such as reading disability, learning disability, mood disorder, or behavioral disorder. In addition, groups did not differ significantly by sex, age, racial/ethnic identification, or parental educational level. A stepwise discriminant analysis indicated the DAS correctly classified 72.5% of the total sample when either the Sequential and Quantitative Reasoning subtest or the Recall of Digits subtest was used to predict group membership. In general, the DAS core subtests were found to be good measures of cognitive ability in children classified with ADHD and did not appear to be influenced by attention problems.