Children with PAE have difficulty shifting and encoding, compared to ADHD individuals without prenatal alcohol exposure, who demonstrated difficulty in focusing and sustaining attention (Coles, 2001). This was confirmed in a meta-analysis comparing PAE children to those without PAE on a variety of measures of executive function, with the largest effect sizes found for set-shifting measures (Khoury, Milligan, & Girard, 2015). A different meta-analysis compared individuals with PAE to those with ADHD (without PAE) and found that the two groups have different cognitive profiles, including increased deficits in set-shifting and verbal fluency in PAE compared to ADHD. These authors also suggest different origins of ADHD diagnosis between the two groups (Kingdon, Cardoso, & McGrath, 2015). Glass and colleagues showed that children with PAE and ADHD were equally impaired at executive function tasks as exposed children without ADHD, whereas in the non-exposed sample, those with ADHD were more impaired than controls, suggesting that these executive function deficits in exposed children are due to different underlying mechanisms of impairment (Glass et al., 2013). A unique etiological origin of ADHD in those with
