The PGS analyses in PNC identified strong association of polygenic ADHD risk with decreased overall IQ (approximated by the WRAT test scores), in line with the high negative genetic correlation of ADHD with educational attainment and the observation that 79% of all ADHD risk variants are associated with decreased educational attainment. Interestingly, we found that ADHD-PGS associates with decreased attention, which is a key ADHD symptom, and with impairments in measures of other cognitive traits such as working memory. Smaller studies have analyzed the impact of ADHD-PGS on executive functions with mixed results66–69. This study robustly identifies specific cognitive domains impacted by ADHD-PGS, and our results support ADHD-PGS being negatively associated with neurocognitive performance.
