title: Offspring ADHD as a risk factor for parental marital problems: controls for genetic and environmental confounds.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Previous studies have found that child attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with more parental marital problems. However, the reasons for this association are unclear. The association might be due to genetic or environmental confounds that contribute to both marital problems and ADHD.
  
  
  METHODS
  Data were drawn from the Australian Twin Registry, including 1,296 individual twins, their spouses, and offspring. We studied adult twins who were discordant for offspring ADHD.Using a discordant twin pairs design, we examined the extent to which genetic and environmental confounds,as well as measured parental and offspring characteristics, explain the ADHD-marital problems association.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Offspring ADHD predicted parental divorce and marital conflict. The associations were also robust when comparing differentially exposed identical twins to control for unmeasured genetic and environmental factors, when controlling for measured maternal and paternal psychopathology,when restricting the sample based on timing of parental divorce and ADHD onset, and when controlling for other forms of offspring psychopathology. Each of these controls rules out alternative explanations for the association.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The results of the current study converge with those of prior research in suggesting that factors directly associated with offspring ADHD increase parental marital problems.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Alice C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Schermerhorn
authors.forename: Brian M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: D'Onofrio
authors.forename: Wendy S
authors.initials: WS
authors.lastname: Slutske
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Emery
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Turkheimer
authors.forename: K Paige
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Harden
authors.forename: Andrew C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Heath
authors.forename: Nicholas G
authors.initials: NG
authors.lastname: Martin
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001289:Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / Q000235:genetics* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D001315:Australia; D004243:Divorce; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D059647:Gene-Environment Interaction; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012189:Retrospective Studies