MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, UK.
Behav Brain Funct. 2010 Oct 28;6:66. doi: 10.1186/1744-9081-6-66.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that starts in childhood and frequently persists in adults. Several theories postulate deficits in ADHD that have effects across many executive functions or in more narrowly defined aspects, such as response inhibition. Electrophysiological studies on children, however, indicate that ADHD is not associated with a core deficit of response inhibition, as abnormal inhibitory processing is typically preceded or accompanied by other processing deficits. It is not yet known if this pattern of abnormal processing is evident in adult ADHD.
The objective of this paper was to investigate event-related potential indices of preparatory states and subsequent response inhibition processing in adults with ADHD. Two cued continuous performance tasks were presented to 21 adults meeting current criteria for adult ADHD and combined type ADHD in childhood, and 20 controls.
The ADHD group exhibited significantly weaker orienting attention to cues, cognitive preparation processes and inhibitory processing. In addition, we observed a strong correlation between the resources allocated to orienting to cues and the strength of the subsequent response strength control processes, suggesting that orienting deficits partly predict and determine response control deficits in ADHD.
These findings closely resemble those previously found in children with ADHD, which indicate that there is not a core response inhibition deficit in ADHD. These findings therefore suggest the possibility of developmental stability into adulthood of the underlying abnormal processes in ADHD.
注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）是一种常见的神经发育障碍，始于儿童期，并且经常持续到成年期。有几种理论假设 ADHD 存在缺陷，这些缺陷会影响到许多执行功能，或者更狭义地定义为反应抑制等方面。然而，对儿童的电生理研究表明，ADHD 与反应抑制的核心缺陷无关，因为异常的抑制处理通常先于或伴随着其他处理缺陷。目前尚不清楚这种异常处理模式是否在成年 ADHD 中明显。
本文旨在探讨成年 ADHD 患者预备状态和后续反应抑制处理的事件相关电位指标。向 21 名符合当前成人 ADHD 和儿童 ADHD 混合类型标准的成年人和 20 名对照者呈现了两种提示连续表现任务。
ADHD 组表现出明显较弱的线索定向注意力、认知准备过程和抑制处理。此外，我们观察到定向线索的资源分配与后续反应强度控制过程的强度之间存在很强的相关性，这表明定向缺陷部分预测和决定了 ADHD 中的反应控制缺陷。
这些发现与以前在 ADHD 儿童中发现的结果非常相似，这表明 ADHD 中不存在核心的反应抑制缺陷。因此，这些发现表明 ADHD 中潜在的异常过程在成年后具有发展稳定性的可能性。
