Adult ADHD - persistence and remission

Professor Philip Shaw discusses research that suggests 20-25% of children with ADHD have a severe adult form, while approximately 33% show complete remission.

There are a lot of very good long-term studies which take groups of children with ADHD when they are young and then follow them up, and some of these studies now have followed people up about 20 years. If you pool the results of all these studies together, what you find, broadly speaking, is that maybe a fifth to a quarter of people have a very severe, persistent ADHD and show very little improvement at all. There is then probably third who get completely better, a complete remission, and there are an awful lot of people who are somewhere in between, who have a lot of symptoms of ADHD, and these can often be really quite impairing, but not quite enough to meet the traditional diagnosis of ADHD. So, it’s a mixed bag. A lot of people have a complete remission, some people have a very persistent severe from, and I think probably the majority are somewhere in between.