The Motor Function Neurological Assessment (MFNU) as an indicator of motor function problems in boys with ADHD
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BioMed Central
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The Motor Function Neurological Assessment (MFNU) as an indicator of motor function problems in boys with ADHD Liv Larsen Stray*1,2, Torstein Stray1,2, Synnøve Iversen2, Anne Ruud1, Bjørn Ellertsen2 and Finn Egil Tønnessen2 Address: 1Department of Child and Adolescent Health, Sørlandet Hospital, Norway and 2The Reading Centre, Faculty of Education and Arts, University of Stavanger, Norway Email: Liv Larsen Stray* - [email protected]; Torstein Stray - [email protected]; Synnøve Iversen - [email protected]; Anne Ruud - [email protected]; Bjørn Ellertsen - [email protected]; Finn Egil Tønnessen - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 18 May 2009 Behavioral and Brain Functions 2009, 5:22
doi:10.1186/1744-9081-5-22
Received: 20 August 2008 Accepted: 18 May 2009
This article is available from: http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/5/1/22 © 2009 Stray et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Background: The paper presents the Motor Function Neurological Assessment (MFNU), as a tool for identifying typical motor function problems in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The study investigated motor functions in boys diagnosed with Hyperkinetic Disorder (HKD, F.90.0). HKD corresponds to the ADHD-combined (ADHD-C) diagnosis in the DSM-IV. The paper addresses the ability of the instrument to discriminate between non-medicated boys with HKD and a control group consisting of normal non-referred boys without any clinical significant ADHD symptoms. Methods: 25 drug-naïve boys, aged 8–12 years and recently diagnosed as HKD F90.0, were compared with 27 controls, all boys in the same age range, on 17 MFNU subtests, and with a 'Total score' parameter. Results: On the individual subtests 80–96% (median 88%) of the ADHD group showed 'moderate' to 'severe' problems, compared to 0–44% (median 14.8%) within the control group. The percentage of 'severe problems' ranged from 44–84%, (median 64%) in the ADHD group, and 0– 44% (median 0%) in the control group. The highly significant differences found between the groups on all subtests, and on the Total score scores, indicated that the MFNU had a high discriminative power when children with ADHD and normal controls were compared. The Total score parameter seemed to be a meaningful discriminator of a common underlying factor of the 17 subtests used in the study. Conclusion: The study confirms our clinical findings that the MFNU measures a consistent pattern of motor function problems in children with HKD, and that these problems are rarely represented in individuals without ADHD. Further research is needed to investigate to what extent the MFNU taps motor problems that are truly specific to ADHD, in con
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