The descriptive epidemiology of DSM-IV Adult ADHD in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Surveys

By J. Fayyad, N. Sampson, I. Hwang, T. Adamowski, S. Aguilar-Gaxiola, A. Al-Hamzawi, L. Andrade, G. Borges, G. de Girolamo, S. Florescu and 15 more. ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders, 2016

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AbstractWe previously reported on the cross-national epidemiology of ADHD from the first 10 countries in the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) Surveys. The current report expands those previous findings to the 20 nationally or regionally representative WMH surveys that have now collected data on adult ADHD. The Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) was administered to 26,744 respondents in these surveys in high-, upper-middle-, and low-/lower-middle-income countries (68.5% mean response rate). Current DSM-IV/CIDI adult ADHD prevalence averaged 2.8% across surveys and was higher in high (3.6%)- and upper-middle (3.0%)- than low-/lower-middle (1.4%)-income countries. Conditional prevalence of current ADHD averaged 57.0% among childhood cases and 41.1% among childhood subthreshold cases. Adult ADHD was significantly related to being male, previously married, and low education. Adult ADHD was highly comorbid with DSM-IV/CIDI anxiety, mood, behavior, and substance disorders and significantly associated with role impairments (days out of role, impaired cognition, and social interactions) when controlling for comorbidities. Treatment seeking was low in all countries and targeted largely to comorbid conditions rather than to ADHD. These results show that adult ADHD is prevalent, seriously impairing, and highly comorbid but vastly under-recognized and undertreated across countries and cultures.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c61275e4b109dfe71504e22b1d6b6fbac219a59

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Citations in the corpus

The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-based Conclusions about the Disorder. (2021, positive): “A meta-analysis of 20 studies encompassing 13 countries and seven regions/metropolitan areas, involving more than 26,000 participants, estimated that 2.8 % of adults meet criteria for ADHD (Fayyad et al., 2017).”
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (2015, methodology): “The current chapter presents an update on these results based on the most recent WMH data, which come from the 20 WMH surveys out of the 29 included in this volume that assessed ADHD (Fayyad et al. 2017).”