Culturally Adapted Treatment Improves Understanding of ADHD In Latinx Families
Latinx parents are more likely to recognize and understand ADHD after engaging in culturally adapted treatment (CAT) that includes parent management training sessions adapted to be more culturally appropriate and acceptable, plus home visits to practice skills. This recent review of ADHD knowledge among Latinx parents found that CAT outperformed evidence-based treatment (EBT) in terms of parent-reported knowledge of ADHD.
August 31, 2020
Latinx parents are more likely to recognize and understand attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or ADD) after engaging with their children in culturally adapted treatment (CAT) for ADHD that includes parent management training sessions adapted to be more culturally appropriate and acceptable, plus home visits to practice skills. Within Latinx families, CAT outperformed the more traditional evidence-based treatment (EBT) in terms of parent-reported knowledge of ADHD, which is correlated with better treatment longevity and outcomes for children. These findings come from the review of an existing study published recently in the Journal of Attention Disorders, which examined the impact of treatment and gender on parental ADHD knowledge in Latinx families.1
The study included 58 Latinx families of school-aged children diagnosed with ADHD, 74% of whom were male. Families were randomly assigned to a CAT or EBT treatment group after completing interviews and a parental ADHD Knowledge Measure.
Before treatment began, paired-samples t-tests were used to determine if mothers and fathers differed in understanding ADHD at pre-treatment, specifically whether they could correctly identify ADHD symptoms. Mothers correctly identified more ADHD symptoms, missed fewer ADHD symptoms, and had a higher total ADHD symptom score than did fathers at pre-treatment.
After CAT, mothers and fathers accurately identified more ADHD symptoms, missed fewer ADHD symptoms, and had a higher total ADHD symptom score relative to pre-treatment. On the other hand, mothers’ knowledge of ADHD did not significantly change following standard EBT, and fathers’ knowledge of ADHD actually worsened across all three outcomes following standard EBT relative to baseline.
This improved ADHD understanding could be because CAT — with its home visits — required much greater involvement with the teacher than did EBT: “Thus, it is possible that greater exposure to and involvement with their child’s teacher and his/her concerns in the classroom, as well as additional therapeutic time in the home setting resulted in parents gaining greater knowledge of ADHD symptomatology over the course of CAT.”
Latinx youth are under-represented in ADHD treatment outcome studies, resulting in little empirical evidence to support effective treatments for this population. This is a public health concern, as nearly one million Latinx youth in the U.S. are estimated to have ADHD.2 Therefore, better understanding of treatments such as CAT can help clinicians better serve Latinx youth with ADHD.
[Read: We Need Equity in ADHD Health Care for African American and Latinx Children]
View Article Sources
1Gerdes, A. C., Malkoff, A., Kapke, T. L., & Grace, M. (2020). Parental ADHD Knowledge in Latinx Families: Gender Differences and Treatment Effects. Journal of Attention Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054720951853
2Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] . (2019). Data and statistics about ADHD. http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html
