ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2023
Increased diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder despite stable hyperactive/inattentive behaviours: evidence from two birth cohorts of Australian children.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Psychiatric diagnosis on the edge: is there evidence of benefit?European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Prevalence of Co-occurring Mental, Neurodevelopmental and Neurological Conditions in Medicaid Beneficiaries With Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Association between child ADHD and caregivers' mental health and health-related quality of life: results from a population-based study.Quality of life research : an international journal of quality of life aspects of treatment, care and rehabilitation · 2026Observational
- Social inequality in mental disorder diagnoses and psychotropic medication use among 15-year-old adolescents in Denmark from 2002-2022.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2026Article
- Developmental trajectories in mental health through adolescence and adulthood: does socio-economic status matter?Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2025Article
- Online interest in ADHD predicts ADHD medication prescriptions in Australia from 2004 to 2023: A time-series analysis revealing COVID-19-related acceleration.Australasian psychiatry : bulletin of Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundGlobally, ADHD diagnoses have increased substantially and there is concern that this trend does not necessarily reflect improved detection of cases but that overdiagnosis may be occurring. We directly compared ADHD diagnoses with ADHD-related behaviours and looked for changes across time among Australian children in a large, population-based prospective cohort study.
methodsWe conducted a secondary analysis of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, including 4,699 children born 1999/2000 (cohort 1) and 4,425 children born 2003/2004 (cohort 2), followed from 4 to 13 years of age. We compared pre-diagnosis parent-reported hyperactive/inattentive behaviour scores between newly diagnosed (incident cases) and undiagnosed children and fitted Cox's proportional hazards regression models to examine the relationship between birth cohorts 1 and 2 and the risk of incident ADHD diagnosis.
resultsCumulative incident ADHD diagnoses increased from 4.6% in cohort 1 (born in 1999/2000) to 5.6% in cohort 2 (born in 2003/2004), while hyperactive/inattentive behaviour scores remained steady. Among ADHD diagnosed children, 26.5% (88/334) recorded pre-diagnosis behaviours in the normal range, 27.6% (n = 92) had borderline scores and 45.8% (n = 153) scored within the clinical range. Children born in 2003/2004 were more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD compared with those born in 1999/2000 (aHR = 1.33, 95% CI = 1.06-1.67, p = .012), regardless of their ADHD behaviour score (p = .972).
conclusionsDiagnostic increases were not driven by rises in hyperactive/inattentive behaviours. A quarter of all children with an ADHD diagnosis recorded pre-diagnosis behaviours within the normal range. The increased likelihood of being diagnosed with ADHD for children from the later birth cohort was observed for children across the full range of ADHD-related behaviours.
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