ADHD and Student Grades in Children from the ABCD Study<sup>®</sup>: A Twin and Siblings Study.

Overview

1. Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University,P.O. Box 980126, Richmond, VA 23298-0126 USA
2. Department of Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne, Austin Health,Heidelberg, VIC Australia
3. Population Neuroscience and Genetics, University of California, San Diego,La Jolla, USA

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms are strongly associated with lower academic performance, yet the nature of this association remains uncertain. We analyzed data from twins and siblings in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® to examine the relationship between ADHD symptoms and school grades using genetically informed models. ADHD symptoms were assessed via the Child Behavior Checklist, and grades were caregiver-reported for the previous school year. Both phenotypes were modeled as ordinal variables. We applied Direction of Causation (DoC) and Mendelian randomization extensions (MR-DoC and MR-DoC2) incorporating polygenic risk scores for ADHD and educational attainment. DoC and MR-DoC comparisons did not distinguish directionality (e.g., DoC forward path estimate = − 0.16, 95% CI [− 0.26, − 0.07]; reverse path = − 0.30, 95% CI [− 0.63, − 0.17]). In MR-DoC2, estimates differed in precision: ADHD-to-grades path = − 0.31, 95% CI [− 0.62, − 0.11]; grades-to-ADHD path = − 0.60, 95% CI [− 1.20, 0.03]. Sex-limitation tests indicated no moderation by sex.

Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10519-026-10274-0.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

No file of the authors' code could be read here: it is described below, and read at its source.

Code Availability

github.com/lf-araujo/2023-mrdoc2-EA-ADHD The scripts used for genetic ancestry assignment and genetic principal component analysis are available upon request

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

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Data Availability

Data used in the preparation of this article were obtained from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (https://abcdstudy.org), held in the NIMH Data Archive (NDA). This is a multisite, longitudinal study designed to recruit more than 10,000 children age 9-10 and follow them over 10 years into early adulthood. A listing of participating sites and a complete listing of the study investigators can be found at https://abcdstudy.org/consortium_members/.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 2, 28 September 2026

• Publisher: n/a → Springer Science+Business Media

Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 6 authors, 3 keywords, 11 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 64 references.

Cite

This paper

Castro-de-Araujo, L. F. S., Zhou, D., Su, M.-H., Kramer, S., Loughnan, R., & Neale, M. C. (2026). ADHD and Student Grades in Children from the ABCD Study<sup>®</sup>: A Twin and Siblings Study. Behavior genetics, 56(4), 194-205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-026-10274-0

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