Best Evidence in Brief: Children with ADHD more likely to have language problems

There is a new Best Evidence in Brief and while I skipped the previous one because the mentioned research was less interesting to my personal taste, this time there is a lot to choose from.

I picked this one first:

Children with Attention-Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can have trouble with hyperactivity, impulsivity, inattention, and distractibility, all of which can affect language and communication and can lead to low academic performance and antisocial behavior.

A systematic review published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry seeks to establish the types of language problems children with ADHD experience in order to inform future research into how these language problems contribute to long-term outcomes for children with ADHD.

Hannah Korrel and colleagues examined the last 35 years of ADHD research and identified 21 studies using 17 language measures, which included more than 2,000 participants (ADHD children = 1,209; non-ADHD children =1,101) for inclusion in the systematic review.

The study found that children with ADHD had poorer performance than non-ADHD children on 11 of the 12 measures of overall language (effect size=1.09). Children with ADHD also had poorer performance on measures of expressive, receptive, and pragmatic language compared with non-ADHD children.