Although there is substantial support for the validity of the diagnosis of ADHD, there is considerable disagreement about how to best capture developmental changes in the expression of ADHD symptomatology. The current paper examines the associations among the 18 individual ADHD symptoms using a novel network analysis approach, from preschool to adulthood. The 1,420 participants were grouped into four age brackets: Preschool (age 3-6, = 109), childhood (age 6-12, = 548), adolescence (age 13-17, = 357), and young adulthood (age 18-36, = 406). All participants completed a multi-stage, multi-informant diagnostic process, and self and informant symptom ratings were obtained. Network analysis indicated ADHD symptom structure became more differentiated over development. Two symptoms and appeared as central, or core, symptoms across all age groups. Thus, a small number of core symptoms may warrant extra weighting in future diagnostic systems.

OBJECTIVE:We design a diagnostic test to evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of A non-intrusive Wearable Diagnostic Assessment System versus SNAP-IV for auxiliary diagnosis of children with ADHD. METHODS:This study included 55 children aged 6-16 years who were clinically diagnosed with ADHD by DSM-5, and 55 healthy children (typically developing). Each subject completes 10 tasks on the WeDA system (Wearable Diagnostic Assessment System) and Parents of each subject complete the SNAP-IV scale. We will calculate the validity indexes, including sensitivity, specificity, Youden's index, likelihood ratio, and other indexes including predictive value, diagnostic odds ratio, diagnostic accuracy and area under the curve [AUC] to assess the effectiveness of the WeDA system as well as the SNAP-IV. RESULTS:The sensitivity (94.55% vs. 76.36%) and the specificity (98.18% vs. 80.36%) of the WeDA system were significantly higher than the SNAP-IV. The AUC of the WeDA system (0.964) was higher than the SNAP-IV (0.907). There is non-statistically significant difference between groups (p = 0.068), and both of them have high diagnostic accuracy. In addition, the diagnostic efficacy of the WeDA system was higher than that of SNAP-IV in terms of the Youden index, diagnostic accuracy, likelihood ratio, diagnostic odds ratio and predictive value. CONCLUSION:The advantages of the WeDA system in terms of diagnostic objectivity, scientific design and ease of operation make it a promising system for widespread use in clinical practice.