Daily Routines and Executive Functioning in Youth with ADHD

The purpose of this study will be to examine if adolescents with ADHD with altered daily or nightly routines show improvements in EF, specifically working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. This will be a pilot study including up to 25 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17 years old, with a diagnosis of ADHD (combined presentation, or predominantly inattentive presentation). Participants will be stratified by gender and randomly assigned to one of two conditions: 1) night routines or 2) daily routines. The intervention is ready to be implemented and adapted for an ADHD population. Though the intervention itself was not focused on sleep hygiene, the team incorporated strategies to increase the likelihood of extending sleep duration, such as reviewing actigraphy and sleep diary data with the participant, collaboration between the participant, caregiver and researcher to address obstacles to obtaining enough sleep, and instructing the participant to obtain a specific amount of sleep. The first study demonstrated that sleep extension in youth with type 1 diabetes (T1DM) was feasible, whereas the ongoing study has demonstrated that overall youth increase TST over a 3-month period. This latter study has a booster session approximately one month after the initial consultation. Thus, this study will last one month with two weeks of baseline to establish sleep patterns and the intervention portion for this study will last for two weeks to monitor whether the youth increase their sleep and ascertain an effect size of intervention impact.