Abstract
The Wender-Utah Rating Scale (WURS) is a widely used self-report instrument for retrospective assessment of childhood ADHD. However, many WURS items are not specific to ADHD. Here, we investigated the effect of excluding these items on the performance of the WURS in predicting adult ADHD based on previous diagnosis and current clinically significant symptoms. The study was conducted on a sample of adults (n = 1014; 48 % male) participating in a family-based investigation of ADHD. Participants completed the 61-item WURS questionnaire and the 66-item Conners Adult ADHD Rating Scale. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to compare the performance of the eight-item WURS (WURS-8) and the longer WURS-25 in predicting previous ADHD diagnosis and current clinically significant ADHD symptoms. WURS-8 and WURS-25 have approximately the same power to predict adult ADHD, based on either previous diagnosis or current symptoms (area under the ROC curves >0.8). WURS-8 performs at least as well as the longer WURS-25 in predicting adult ADHD. This 8-item questionnaire is thus a valid instrument and is especially useful for screening for ADHD in large epidemiological samples.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the families who participated in this research. This study was supported in part by the Division of Intramural Research, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA. DD is funded by National Health and Medical Research Council Project Grant No. 1043256. JIV was supported by the Eccles Scholarship in Medical Sciences, the Fenner Merit Scholarship and the Australian National University High Degree Research scholarships. The authors would like to thank Teresa Neeman for advice on statistical analysis.
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Participants provided written consent to their inclusion in the study, which was approved by the National Human Genome Research Institute Institutional Review Board. The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work has been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments.
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Das, D., Vélez, J.I., Acosta, M.T. et al. Retrospective assessment of childhood ADHD symptoms for diagnosis in adults: validity of a short 8-item version of the Wender-Utah Rating Scale. ADHD Atten Def Hyp Disord 8, 215–223 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12402-016-0202-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12402-016-0202-9