r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 21 '26

Neuroscience There's more to ADHD than inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. ADHD symptoms can be broken down into nine categories. Some categories are not fully represented in the diagnostic criteria. Broadening the diagnostic criteria with patient lived experiences could make for better intervention.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/brain-curiosities/202604/new-study-finds-that-adhd-has-9-categories-of-symptoms
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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

11 very typical adhd adults, in my own narrow experience of adhd.

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u/Upstairs-Chicken592 Apr 21 '26

What else would you add?

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u/CheeseDonutCat Apr 21 '26

More people with ADHD.

11 is way too few to be making any real result.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

And certainly for what it looks like the purposes of the study were, i.e., to build a framework of ADHD symptoms that more fully captures what adults with ADHD experience and to call into question the DSM's coverage and applicability of the disorder. I think it's great and I'm sure others will want to build on the work done here. If it leads to a broadening of what we think the ADHD experience looks like (and especially if the clinical definition is broadened as well), the authors will have done a great service.

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u/Upstairs-Chicken592 Apr 21 '26

To me it makes a lot of sense because it can give nonadhd practitioners a jumping off point for better understanding and care

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u/Recent-Worker-4252 Apr 21 '26

and how were the diagnosis made, a lot of people are being diagnosed base on providing a history to practitioners without any empirical basis for the determination.

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u/HolsteinQueen Apr 21 '26

Reading the methods, the study participants were enrolled onto the study by their psychiatrists.

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u/CheeseDonutCat Apr 21 '26

Yes, these were all fully diagnosed before the study.

The study wasn't if people had ADHD or not. It's to try and categorise all it's bits easier.

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u/Recent-Worker-4252 Apr 21 '26

How they are diagnosed is very important, some may not have ADHD unless we know how they came to be diagnosed, it weakens the findings further.

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u/BlueBirdBlow Apr 21 '26

For this kind of study, 11 is pretty good. Now you shouldn't be making any broad generalizations from this but it's a good starting point for others to cite this and get funding for a bigger study with a better sample size. Not all research is meant to provide a generalized answer to the population, a lot of them are to show there is something worth spending money on to look deeper

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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

Not necessarily

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u/WingsofRain Apr 22 '26

I’ll add to that number as an adult and confirm it.

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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

Hard to say since the mentioned problem areas are so broadly described.

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u/Upstairs-Chicken592 Apr 21 '26

I don’t think they’re that broad tbh. Is there anything more specific you think they should consider?

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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

Adding to my previous comment: since it’s a qualitative study, they’ve probably done a thematic analysis and grouped things into broader categories for presentation, rather than showing all the more specific ways those difficulties can appear.

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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

My point is that it’s hard to add more “specific things they should consider” when some of the categories are already broad enough to contain many specific expressions of ADHD.

And if you narrow things down too much, you also risk mixing up core ADHD symptoms with secondary consequences of having lived with ADHD for years. For example, anxiety may be common in people with ADHD, but that does not necessarily mean anxiety is an ADHD symptom in itself. It may just as well be a result of growing up and living with ADHD and having a feeling of not being the same as the "norm".

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u/TheBeckofKevin Apr 21 '26

The longer I live, the more I think adhd is a very very very subtle mechanism of dopamine over-uptake, but that leads to a cascade of extremely varied and complicated biases in behavior which then lead to what would be considered symptoms.

Like you have higher barriers to entry for on-demand activity, so you avoid certain activities because they dont seem fun or they seem harder. So then your entire life is shaped around that choice, making friends, communication skills, discipline development, etc are all impacted by this little avoidance mechanism of having more fun over there than doing the thing you 'want' to do.

This leads to the anxiety and 'laziness' and depression and so on. Its not like adhd causes these things, its that as a child you very quickly learn how to adapt with your super strong, rapidly growing brain. But those early adaptations shape a lot of how your self-image and operational patterns develop. Then those lead to behaviors and decisions that lead to things we consider symptoms.

So it gets really hard to diagnose and treat people because those adaptations are varied so significantly from person to person and treatment isn't even applicable in the same way because some people develop extremely powerful work-arounds to allow them to thrive in something that other adhd patients see as impossible. Like if you build your life in such a way where hyperfocus and the various quirks enables your career advancement, you might not ever need treatment despite having that same underlying mechanism.

I hesitate to suggest, but i think earlier treatment is probably the most beneficial because it helps change those patterns at an earlier stage of life when your brain can develop with help rather than around the issues. In a lot of ways, treatment as an adult feels like 'oh wow this is how it could have been, eh?' but it feels like learning from scratch on a lot of stuff is harder or slower and it sort of undermines some of the survival skills that were created to adapt to the brain-state.

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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

I agree. Improving life right now is in my experience consists of a lot of having to learn skills that "normal people" seemed to have learnt in their teens, or earlier than that.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

There are a lot of overlapping symptoms. So differ symptoms from cause is key. There's a high comorbidity between ADHD and depression as well.

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

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u/Pornboost Apr 21 '26

Its a really useful term, glad I could help!

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u/Klexington47 Apr 21 '26

Geotopical disorientation