Cross-sectional and longitudinal relations among irritability, ADHD symptoms, and inhibitory control in the ABCD Study

GitHub repository to accompany the manuscript "Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Relations Among Irritability, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms, and Inhibitory Control" published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry¹. This paper reflects pre-registered analyses² using of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study 4.0 release.³

This repository contains analysis code and lists of participants included in the analyses.

Research Questions

The primary research goal was to examine the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations among irritability, ADHD symptoms, and inhibitory control at the baseline and 2-year follow-up time points of the ABCD Study dataset. The research plan - including planned variables, sample size, and analyses - was outlined in a pre-registration that was finalized before analyses were conducted.

Dataset and Variables

All data for this study came from the baseline and 2-year follow-up time points from the ABCD Study 4.0 release, accessed on April 20, 2022. The dataset is accessible through protected access via https://nda.nih.gov/abcd/.

The study focused on the following data files (and data columns) from the ABCD Study:

• abcd_cbcls01: irritability (see details below), ADHD symptoms (cbcl_scr_dsm5_adhd_r)

• abcd_tbss01: inhibitory control (nihtbx_flanker_cs)

• acspsw03: age (interview_age), sex (sex), race/ethnicity (race_ethnicity)

• abcd_lt01: site (site_id_l)

• pdem02: combined parental income (demo_prnt_income_v2 and demo_prtnr_income_v2), highest parental income (max of demo_prnt_ed_v2 and demo_prtnr_ed_v2)

• ssphp: pubertal status (pds_p_ss_female_category_2 and pds_p_ss_male_category_2)

The irritability measure is a sum-score scale constructed from five items of the parent-reported Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). This irritability scale is drawn from a published paper (Cordova et al., 2022)⁴ which demonstrated high convergence between this measure and dimensional ADHD symptom measures.

• Stubborn, sullen, or irritable (cbcl_q86_p)

• Temper tantrums or hot temper (cbcl_q95_p)

• Sudden changes in mood or feelings (cbcl_q87_p)

• Sulks a lot (cbcl_q88_p)

• Argues a lot (cbcl_q03_p)

Sample

Participants were excluded based on missing any of the following:

• irritability score items from the CBCL

• ADHD DSM 5 Scale raw score from the CBCL

• computed score from the NIH Toolbox Flanker Inhibitory Control and Attention task

• age

• sex

• race/ethnicity

Participants were included in the final longitudinal analyses based on complete data at both the baseline and 2-year follow-up. This yielded a final total sample size of 7,444 participants, which were randomly assigned to either a "discovery" or "replication" subsample.

Lists of participants included in the main analyses can be found in discovery_sample.csv and replication_sample.csv. Participants also included in the sensitivity analysis (retaining only one sibling per family) can be found in discovery_sample_sensitivity.csv and replication_sample_sensitivity.csv.

Analysis Code

The script clpm.R performs a two-wave cross-lagged pannel model (CLPM) with maximum likelihood estimation using the lavaan R package (v0.6.9).⁵ This main analysis, done separately for the discovery and replication samples, examines the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations among irritability, ADHD symptoms, and inhibitory control, measured at the baseline and 2-year follow-up time points.

References

Footnotes

1. McKay, C.C., De Jesus, A.V., Peterson, O., Leibenluft, E., Kircanski, K. (2024). Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Relations Among Irritability, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptoms, and Inhibitory Control. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. doi: 10.1016/j.jaac.2023.10.015 ↩

2. McKay, C.C., De Jesus, A.V., Peterson, O., Leibenluft, E., Kircanski, K. Cross-sectional and longitudinal relations among irritability, ADHD symptoms, and inhibitory control in the ABCD study. osf.io/vzter. Published June 26, 2023. ↩

3. Volkow, N.D., Koob, G.F., Croyle, R.T., Bianchi, D.W., Gordon, J.A., Koroshetz, W.J., Pérez-Stable, E.J., Riley, W.T., Bloch, M.H., Conway, K., Deeds, B.G., Dowling, G.J., Grant, S., Howlett, K.D., Matochik, J.A., Morgan, G.D., Murray, M.M., Noronha, A., Spong, C.Y., Wargo, E.M., … Weiss, S.R.B. (2018). The conception of the ABCD study: From substance use to a broad NIH collaboration. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 32, 4–7. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2017.10.002 ↩

4. Cordova, M.M., Antovich, D.M., Ryabinin, P., Neighbor, C., Mooney, M.A., Dieckmann, N.F., Miranda-Dominguez, O., Nagel, B.J., Fair, D.A., & Nigg, J.T. (2022). Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Restricted Phenotypes Prevalence, Comorbidity, and Polygenic Risk Sensitivity in the ABCD Baseline Cohort. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 61(10), 1273–1284. doi: 10.1016/j.jaac.2022.03.030 ↩

5. Rosseel Y. (2012). lavaan: An R Package for Structural Equation Modeling. Journal of Statistical Software, 48(2), 1–36. doi: 10.18637/jss.v048.i02 ↩