Dementia Is 3 Times More Likely To Develop In ADHD Adults

(CTN News) – ADHD is nearly three times more likely to cause dementia in adults than in those without the mental disorder, according to a new study.

According to the researchers from Israel, Sweden and the United States, who followed more than one million participants over a period of 17 years in order to study the effects of ADHD in adults, ADHD is the result of a neurobiological process that reduces their ability to compensate for cognitive decline later in life.

Additionally, less cognitive and brain reserve may lead to neurological processes of ADHD that, in turn, reduce compensation abilities, the Dementia authors write in their study published in THE Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network Open, a journal of the American Medical Association.

The symptoms of ADHD include inability to pay attention for longer periods of time, hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior in addition to inability to pay attention for longer periods of time.

In previous studies, evidence has been suggested that adult-onset ADHD occurs in 5 per cent of children with ADHD when they reach adulthood, and that adult ADHD constitutes 3 per cent of all adult ADHD cases in the US.

Dementia in adults with ADHD

Additionally, studies have shown that the social, psychological, and genetic profiles of child and adult ADHD are different from one another. Despite the fact that adult ADHD differs from ADHD in childhood, little is known about this disorder, according to the researchers.

In order to better inform caregivers and clinicians about the risks associated with dementia in adults with ADHD, the outcomes of this study can be used to determine whether these risks can be altered by medications, supplements for ADHD, and/or lifestyle changes,” said study author Michal Schnaider Beeri from the Brain Health Institute (BHI), based in Rutgers University.

In order to perform this study, they used data from a national cohort study consisting of 1,09,218 members of a non-profit health maintenance organization in Israel who were born between 1933 and 1952 (aged 51 to 70 years old).

The participants were enrolled into the cohort on January 1, 2003, without a diagnosis of ADHD or dementia. They were followed up until February 28, 2020. There were 51.7% of females in this group and 48.3% of males in this group.

During the follow-up period, the researchers found that 730 participants, or 0.7 per cent of the participants, were diagnosed with adult ADHD, and 7,726, or 7.1 per cent, were diagnosed with dementia.

In the 7,726 dementia cases reported, 96 cases were among the 730 adults who were diagnosed with ADHD, and the remaining 7,630 cases were among the 1,08,488 adult who were not diagnosed with ADHD.

This study showed that ADHD diagnosis in adults was associated with a 2.77-fold increased risk of incident dementia as compared to adults without ADHD diagnosis.

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