Does Pharmacological Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in Adults Enhance Parenting Performance?

Seventy families with at least one parent (either mother or father who will serve as the identified subject) and a school-aged child (ages 5-16) with ADHD will be recruited to participate in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of lisdexamfetamine to assess the acute and prolonged effects of medication usage on parent-child interactions. The protocol will employ traditional self-report measures of parental competency and functioning used in other studies, but will supplement them with one of the most widely used observational laboratory tasks. Families will be recruited on a rolling basis and the length of the study will be approximately 8 weeks. In the first three weeks of the study, parents will complete the dose optimization phase to find the optimal dose of lisdexamfetamine. Lisdexamfetamine will be initiated at a dose of 30mg and increased to 50mg for week 2 and 70mg for week 3. During week 4, measures of the acute effects of lisdexamfetamine will be collected, and parents will complete the observational laboratory parent child interaction tasks two times (i.e., on lisdexamfetamine and on placebo- phase I). In the remaining four weeks of the study (phase 2) a between subjects comparison will be conducted. Half of the parents will be randomized to receive lisdexamfetamine and half will receive a placebo. Measures of parent functioning will once again be collected at the end of phase 2 and parents will complete the observational laboratory task, which will allow for exploration of prolonged lisdexamfetamine treatment on parent-child interactions.