Developmental Twin Study of Attention Problems

A longitudinal twin study on IQ, executive functioning, and attention problems during childhood and early adolescence.

Variation in human behavior may be caused by differences in genotype and by non-genetic differences ("environment") between individuals. The relative contributions of genotype (G) and environment (E) to phenotypic variation can be assessed with the classical twin design. We illustrate this approach with longitudinal data collected in 5 and 12-year-old Dutch twins. At age 5 data on cognitive abi...

A developmental study of visual selective attention.

Developmental associations between traits of autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a genetically informative, longitudinal twin study.

BACKGROUND Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and associated subclinical traits, regularly co-occur with one another. However, the aetiology of their co-occurrence remains poorly understood. This paper provides the first genetically informative, longitudinal analysis of the interaction between traits of ASD and ADHD, and explores their genetic an...

From alcohol initiation to tolerance to problems: Discordant twin modeling of a developmental process.

The current study examined a stage-based alcohol use trajectory model to test for potential causal effects of earlier drinking milestones on later drinking milestones in a combined sample of two cohorts of Australian monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twins (N = 7,398, age M = 30.46, SD = 2.61, 61% male, 56% monozygotic twins). Ages of drinking, drunkenness, regular drinking, tolerance, first n...

Adolescence Health: the Needs, Problems and Attention

  Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and psychological human development that generally occurs during the period from puberty to legal adulthood. There are approximately 1.2 billion adolescents (10-19 years) globally, roughly 90% of whom live in low and middle-income countries. Most are healthy, but there is still significant death, illness and diseases among adolescents. Illnesses...