Publications by authors named "Brooke Molina"

Recent studies report a fluctuating course of attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) across development characterized by intermittent periods of remission and recurrence. In the Multimodal Treatment of ADHD (MTA) study, we investigated fluctuating ADHD including clinical expression over time, childhood predictors, and between- and within-person associations with factors hypothesized as relevant to remission and recurrence. Children with ADHD, combined type (N 483), participating in the MTA adult follow-up were assessed 9 times from baseline (mean age = 8.

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Objective: To test whether pediatrician training leads to provider utilization of stimulant diversion prevention strategies as reported by adolescent patients with ADHD.

Methods: Pediatric practices received a stimulant diversion prevention workshop (SDP) or continued treatment-as-usual (TAU) in a cluster-randomized controlled trial. Surveys were completed by 341 stimulant-treated patients at baseline and three follow-up assessments.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the concept of "helicopter parenting" specifically focusing on adolescents with ADHD to assess how over-involved parenting affects their transition into adulthood.
  • Researchers adapted a measure of helicopter parenting for this demographic and analyzed responses from 333 adolescents and their parents to determine its validity.
  • Results revealed two main components of parenting styles—Parental Intervention and Day-to-Day Monitoring—which varied based on the adolescents' age and demographic factors, suggesting that parenting approaches are not uniform across different backgrounds.
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Objective: The shelter-in-place mandates enacted early in the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in changes in alcohol use and consequent outcomes. We assessed changes in six categories of season-specific alcohol-attributable mortality from before to during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

Method: We used logistic regression models to assess alcohol-attributable mortality in the United States from 2017 through 2020 ( = 11,632,725 decedents ages 18 and older).

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Background: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention and/or impulsivity/hyperactivity. ADHD, especially when persisting into adulthood, often includes emotional dysregulation, such as affect lability; however, the neural correlates of emotionality in adults with heterogeneous ADHD symptom persistence remain unclear.

Methods: The present study sought to determine shared and distinct functional neuroanatomical profiles of neural circuitry during emotional interference resistance using the emotional face n-back task in adult participants with persisting (n = 47), desisting (n = 93), or no (n = 42) childhood ADHD symptoms while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging.

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  • The study investigates how a parent's history of alcohol problems and antisocial behavior relates to adolescent alcohol use, particularly focusing on whether the child's ADHD status influences this relationship.
  • It involved 199 adolescents, with roughly half having ADHD, who assessed their perceptions of their parent’s drinking motives and reported their own alcohol use behaviors over the past year.
  • Results indicate that perceptions of parent drinking motives influenced adolescent alcohol use, especially in those without ADHD, suggesting the need for better communication about alcohol use between parents and their children.
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The genetic architectures underlying symptoms of conduct problems and depression have largely been examined separately and without incorporating temperament, despite evidence for their genetic overlap. We examined how symptoms and temperament dimensions were transmitted together in families to identify highly heritable composite phenotypes, and how these composite phenotypes predicted alcohol outcomes in young adulthood. Participants (N = 486) were drawn from the third generation of families oversampled for alcohol use disorder in the first generation.

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In their recent examination of the Monitoring the Future (MTF) data, McCabe et al. (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2023) address the complex, longstanding, and clinically valuable questions of whether and how stimulant medication treatment for adolescents with ADHD relates to their risk for substance use. Here, we expand on the authors' interpretations of their nuanced findings of increased risk for illicit stimulant use and non-prescribed stimulant medication use for youth with later age of medication treatment initiation and shorter treatment duration.

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Importance: Possible associations between stimulant treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and subsequent substance use remain debated and clinically relevant.

Objective: To assess the association of stimulant treatment of ADHD with subsequent substance use using the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD (MTA), which provides a unique opportunity to test this association while addressing methodologic complexities (principally, multiple dynamic confounding variables).

Design, Setting, And Participants: MTA was a multisite study initiated at 6 sites in the US and 1 in Canada as a 14-month randomized clinical trial of medication and behavior therapy for ADHD but transitioned to a longitudinal observational study.

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Article Synopsis
  • ADHD can persist into older age and may increase the risk for cognitive decline and Alzheimer's Disease (AD), but research has been limited due to biased data sources.
  • This study examined the link between genetic risk for ADHD and cognitive decline in cognitively unimpaired older adults across six years, using a well-established ADHD polygenic risk score (ADHD-PRS) in 212 participants aged 55-90.
  • The findings indicated that higher ADHD-PRS is associated with greater cognitive decline and AD-related changes, particularly in individuals with amyloid-β deposition, suggesting that ADHD genetic risk contributes to vulnerability to AD pathology.
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  • The study explored the effectiveness of a one-hour training program for pediatric primary care providers (PCPs) to reduce the diversion of stimulant medications for ADHD among adolescents.
  • PCPs who received the training reported a significant increase in the use of patient and family education strategies at all follow-up intervals compared to those who did not receive training.
  • Overall, while the training improved knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards diversion prevention, it did not significantly impact medication management or assessment of mental health issues.
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Objective: To test whether adolescents' perceived ADHD symptoms may improve while monitoring them throughout the day.

Method: In a sample of 90 adolescents ( = 14.7; 66% boys, 34% girls; 76.

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Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly prevalent disorder commonly identified in childhood. Affective and cognitive characteristics that are identifiable as early as infancy could be signals of risk for developing ADHD. Specifically, the interplay between emotionality and cognition may be important in predicting early symptoms of ADHD.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study aimed to assess the quality of life (QoL) for mothers of adolescents, both with and without a history of childhood ADHD, finding that mothers of children with ADHD reported significantly worse QoL than those without.
  • - Maternal depression, adolescent age, ADHD status, and discipline issues were identified as key predictors of lower QoL, with ADHD being the most significant factor, resulting in a loss of approximately 1.96 Quality Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) over a child's lifetime.
  • - The findings highlight the substantial health and financial impacts on caregivers of children with ADHD, indicating a potential loss of $98,000 to $196,000, underscoring the need for healthcare systems to
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  • A study looked at how ADHD affects teens' school performance and whether they go on to higher education, involving 749 participants from different places.
  • Teens with ADHD who went to postsecondary education had somewhat milder symptoms compared to those who didn’t, but the differences weren’t huge.
  • All teens showed a drop in their school performance from ages 9 to 17, but those with ADHD who enrolled in higher education ended high school with better grades than those who didn’t.
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Impulsivity is a multidimensional construct with well-documented risk for substance use problems at both the trait- and state levels. A circadian preference towards eveningness has been linked to trait-level, global impulsivity, but whether this association holds true across multiple dimensions of impulsivity and whether actual sleep timing shows parallel associations with impulsivity remain unclear. Here, we extend existing literature by investigating whether eveningness is associated with multiple facets of both trait- and state-level impulsivity.

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Background And Aims: Studies have demonstrated that ecological momentary assessment (EMA) can effectively capture within-person variations in impulsive states and that this relates to alcohol use. The current study aimed to examine the daily trajectories of five facets of impulsivity prior to and following drinking initiation. Additionally, we explored how race, sex, baseline trait impulsivity facets, and ADHD may moderate this relation.

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Objective: Little is known about the experience of parenting infants when a mother or father has ADHD. This study examined cross-sectional predictors of parenting distress experienced by parents with and without ADHD who also have infants.

Methods: Participants were 73 mother-father pairs ( = 146) of infants 6 to 10 months old.

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Objective: The General Life Functioning Scale (GLF) was developed to provide a complementary alternative to existing measures of impairment. We examined the psychometric properties of the GLF-Parent version (GLF-P), given the known value of informant ratings.

Methods: The GLF-P was administered to parents of adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosed in childhood and a nonADHD comparison group in the Pittsburgh ADHD Longitudinal Study.

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Background And Aims: Black drinkers compared with White drinkers experience more alcohol-related problems. Examination of social determinants of inequities in alcohol problems is needed. The current study measured (1) associations between acute stress and alcohol craving in the naturalistic environment for self-identified Black and White individuals who drink alcohol and (2) whether a history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) moderated these associations.

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  • The study examined the long-term outcomes of childhood ADHD in a sample of 558 children, focusing on recovery and remission patterns into adulthood.
  • About 30% of the children experienced full remission at some point, but most had relapses, with only 9.1% achieving sustained remission by adulthood.
  • Findings indicate that instead of the commonly believed 50% outgrowing ADHD, most participants had fluctuating symptoms, with 90% continuing to experience residual issues into young adulthood.*
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Background: Although individuals with histories of childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) report more alcohol-related problems in adulthood than those without ADHD, it is unknown whether there are group differences in certain types of alcohol problems. We tested whether the nature of alcohol problems differed for individuals with and without childhood ADHD, as well as adulthood-persistent ADHD, to facilitate a personalized medicine approach for alcohol problems in this high-risk group.

Methods: Data were drawn from a prospective, observational study.

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Objective: To describe adult outcome of people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosed in childhood and its several key predictors via a review of 7 North American controlled prospective follow-up studies: Montreal, New York, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Berkeley, and 7-site Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With ADHD (MTA).

Method: All studies were prospective and followed children with a diagnosis of ADHD and an age- and gender-matched control group at regular intervals from childhood (6-12 years of age) through adolescence into adulthood (20-40 years of age), evaluating symptom and syndrome persistence, functional outcomes, and predictors of these outcomes.

Results: The rates of ADHD syndrome persistence ranged from 5.

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Objective: To describe the clinical and psychosocial characteristics, and their hypothesized interrelations, as it pertains to risk for stimulant diversion (sharing, selling, or trading) for adolescents in pediatric primary care treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Methods: Baseline data for 341 adolescents in a cluster-randomized controlled trial of stimulant diversion prevention in pediatric primary care (NCT_03080259) were used to (1) characterize diversion and newly measured risk factors, (2) examine their associations with age and sex, and (3) test whether associations among risk factors were consistent with model-implied predictions. Data were collected through multi-informant electronic surveys from adolescents and parents.

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Objective: To test whether smoking-specific risk factors in early adulthood mediate prediction to daily smoking from childhood ADHD.

Methods: Participants were 237 with and 164 without childhood ADHD. A smoking risk profile score comprising smoking-specific factors measured between ages 18 to 25 (e.

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