Back in 2015, a team of Danish researchers followed nearly 2 million people and reported in the British medical journal The Lancet that an ADHD diagnosis roughly doubled the risk of dying early. The statistic has been quoted so many times it’s become conventional wisdom, and I’ve lost track of the number of people who’d thrown it at me. Not to mention worried parents of Hunter kids.
Finally, though, a group of researchers at Cambridge and University College London finally decided to figure out why that awful number was so consistently predictable. And it blows up this folklore that our Hunter genes are shortening our lives.
The team — led by Haibin Li and the epidemiologist G. David Batty — used the American National Health Interview Survey of just over 52,000 US adults and tracked them for nearly eight years. The preprint on medRxiv was summarized this month by the ADHD Evidence Project.
They found that people diagnosed with ADHD had a 58 percent higher risk of death during the study period, making an ADHD diagnosis as apparently dangerous as poverty, hypertension, or diabetes. Again, this was repeated broadly by a credulous press.
But then they started peeling back the layers. When they controlled for income, it shaved 11 percent off the early-death/ADHD link. Physical illnesses having nothing to do with ADHD took away another 15 percent. Smoking, drinking, inactivity, and obesity accounted for another 17 percent.
But the kicker was psychological distress. When they filtered out the ADHD people who did not experience anxiety or depression, fully 58 percent of that connection between early death and ADHD vanished altogether.
The result was so dramatic that they noted that the remaining risk was no longer statistically significant. As they wrote, the effect of ADHD on mortality was:
“largely embodied via a series of malleable characteristics, particularly mental illness.”
In other words it’s not having a Hunter brain that’s shortening people’s lives; its what happens when Hunters are repeatedly beaten down by a society with Farmer standards and expectations, producing anxiety and depression.