Age-dependent diffierences in neuropsychological performance profiles in ADHD and autism

Objectives: Children and adolescents with autism or with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are compared in this study to three different age groups of healthy children and adolescents normally developed in terms of the severity of neuropsychological variables. Methods: 2 children with autism and 31 children with ADHD according to DSM-IV as well as 30 healthy controls were assessed consecutively. Neuropsychological attention tasks (sustained attention, inhibition and setshifting) and executive functioning tasks (working memory and planning) were performed. Facial affect recognition ws assessed with a computer-based program to teach emotion processing using full faces and selected eye-pairs. Results: Our data provide evidence that the attention functions we studied seem to improve with age. Differences between the two clinical groups are found particularly among the 11- to 14-year-olds in the domains of sustained attention and inhibition. We detected no statistically significant differences among the three age groups in either the domain of executive functions or in the domain of facial affect recognition. Conclusions: Although our results can only be interpreted with caution because of the descriptive character of the study and the small sample size, it nonetheless seems to be reasonable to take into account age as a relevant aspect in the utilisation of neuropsychological test procedures to better master the individual performance of different patient groups.