Despite reports of a recent surge in ADHD, a global analysis has found no reliable evidence of an increase in the number of children diagnosed with the condition since 2020
By Michael Le Page
5 June 2025 Last updated 5 June 2025
There are concerns that more children are being diagnosed with ADHD
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Is ADHD in children on the rise? An assessment of thousands of studies released since 2020 suggests, surprisingly, that the answer is no – but the researchers behind the work have expressed their frustration at the poor quality of data available, meaning that the true picture remains murky.
“The best data we have suggests that there has been no meaningful increase in ADHD prevalence,” says Alex Martin at King’s College London, but that masks a larger problem, she says. “Most of the research is too biased to draw conclusions from.”
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While there may have been no rise since 2020, the data shows there are still big differences between countries in terms of the proportion of children being diagnosed with ADHD.
The team’s initial search for recent studies on the prevalence of ADHD produced more than 9000 results. “We read every single one,” says Martin. But only 40 studies included original data from after 2020 that was based on formal diagnoses or surveys that could be included in the analysis. And of these, only four were high-quality studies that avoided serious biases – for instance, through diagnoses being made by qualified clinicians.
Two of the four were from the US, one was from Canada and one was from Sweden. Each looked at diagnoses over a number of years. For example, one of the US studies looked at data from 2017 to 2022. According to these studies, in the US, around 10 per cent of children have been diagnosed with ADHD, compared with 8 per cent in Canada and 3 per cent in Sweden.