Less than 1% of published ADHD research is dedicated to women patients. This inequity is maddening, but less shocking when you consider the fact that ADHD was regarded as a strictly childhood disorder just 20 years ago.
ADHD in adults did not exist, according to medical literature published a generation ago.During my psychiatry residency from 1987 to 1991, I only treated one adult with ADHD, a young man who was having difficulty in his medical school classes.
After completing my child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship, however, I joined the United States Air Force, where I saw many enlisted members who had untreated ADHD and could not pass testing to get promoted to the next rank.
Clearly, ADHD in adults was real.Still, adult ADHD did not land on the national radar until 2006, when Ronald Kessler, Ph.D., and his colleagues published data from a study in the International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research that estimated a prevalence of 4.4 percent in adults.