Is it possible to determine the level of functional impairment that distinguishes the patients with ADHD from those without ADHD?

Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis of the Weiss Functional Impairment Rating Scale‐Parent Report for screening children with ADHD: Looking beyond symptoms in ADHD diagnosis

“…The optimal cutoff scores for the WFIRS‐P total scale in the present study (0.45) was lower than reported in Thompson et al (2017) study (0.65) and higher than reported in Tarakçıoğlu et al (2019) study (0.32). All of these scores are between ‘not at all’ (0) and somewhat (1).…”

“…Weiss Functional Impairment Rating Scale‐Parent Report can be scored dimensionally by calculating the mean score, or by a clinical scoring procedure in which a child is considered to have functional impairment if either two items of a domain are rated at least 2 or ‘often or pretty much’, or one item of a domain is rated as 3 or ‘very often or very much’. Two studies (Tarakçıoğlu et al, 2019; Thompson et al, 2017) have provided empirical definitions of functional impairment for the WFIRS‐P to differentiate children with ADHD (age 5–18 years) from controls. In Thompson et al (2017) study on children from different Western countries, the cutoff value was 0.65 for the WFIRS‐P total scale and between 0.22 and 1 for the subscales.…”

“…In Thompson et al (2017) study on children from different Western countries, the cutoff value was 0.65 for the WFIRS‐P total scale and between 0.22 and 1 for the subscales. In Tarakçıoğlu et al (2019) study on Turkish children, the cutoff score was 0.32 for the WFIRS‐P total scale and ranges from 0.01 to 0.60 for the subscales. Both studies used Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) to find the optimal cutoff that best discriminates ADHD from controls.…”

Validation of the Weiss Functional Impairment Rating Scale (WFIRS-P) as a Functional Impairment Measure in a General Population of Schoolchildren

“…However, the size of their sample may have limited the power to detect differences. Currently, the recommended WFIRS-P cut-offs to differentiate children with and without ADHD with regard to impairment are not age-and-sex-stratified as no age or sex differences were found in studies examining these cut-offs (Tarakçıoğlu et al, 2019; Thompson et al, 2017). In these studies, however, two broad age bands of children aged 5 to 12 and adolescents aged 13 to 19 were compared, and few girls relative to boys with ADHD were included.…”

“…However, to our knowledge, no study has investigated the sensitivity/specificity of this scoring procedure where a domain is categorized as impaired or not. Instead, studies have investigated optimal cut-offs for mean scores (including sensitivity/specificity) when screening for ADHD (Tarakçıoğlu et al, 2019; Thompson et al, 2017), and future studies should address these properties for the other scoring procedure (Hadianfard et al, 2021).…”