Short Report: Intervention of Reading and Spelling Problems in Children With Co‐Occurring Attention‐Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Dyslexia

Despite the high co-occurrence of dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia is undertreated in children with ADHD. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether standard intervention for dyslexia is as effective for children with co-occurring ADHD and dyslexia as for those with dyslexia only. Children with co-occurring ADHD and dyslexia (n = 16), and with dyslexia only (n = 16) received a phonics-based intervention for dyslexia. Reading and spelling skills were tested at the start and at the end of intervention. Bayesian repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed that children in the co-occurring ADHD and dyslexia group had, on average, poorer levels of reading and spelling proficiency at the baseline. Intervention was equally effective in children with ADHD and dyslexia as it was in those with dyslexia only for reading fluency. For spelling, our results suggested stronger gains in the ADHD and dyslexia group than in the dyslexia only group. These results suggest that the effectiveness of intervention for dyslexia was not negatively affected by the presence of co-occurring ADHD.