ADHD can be bad enough on its own, and now we get news from a study published in JAMA Network Open by researchers at University College London and the University of Liverpool that a meta-analysis of nearly 16 million people across three continents found that people with ADHD have a 70 percent higher rate of death from all causes across the board…which significantly plummets when they get on medication.
Living with a brain that constantly refuses to fully hold onto ideas and actions is already an exhausting full-time nightmare and can leave people feeling like they don’t have full control over their own lives. And now, on top of that, tracking data across two decades reveals that having ADHD comes with a huge drop in life expectancy.
Suicide risk rockets by 90 percent, while injury-related fatalities jump by 55 percent. Even boring old dying of natural causes creeps up by 27 percent due to the link to physical issues like cardiovascular disease and the kind of erratic health habits you’d expect someone with attention deficit issues to have.
ADHD Is Linked to a 70% Higher Risk of Death, According to a Major New Study
With ADHD, impulse control glitches out, and ordinary situations that most people can tackle as effortlessly as they grieve can sometimes, for the ADHD mind, become dangerous. Think stuff like drifting off behind the wheel or forgetting to take pills that manage a chronic illness. In the United States, our healthcare system is such a tangled mess of unnecessary bureaucracy that it’s quite easy to imagine someone with ADHD giving up and forgetting about filing a claim or even getting on a healthcare plan to begin with.
It sounds quite depressing, that is, until the researchers found that all of that could be mostly eliminated if someone with ADHD remembers to regularly take ADHD medication. Among those diagnosed, participants taking ADHD meds saw their overall mortality risk drop by about 25 percent. The researchers note that this specific metric comes from a smaller subset of three studies, but the overall idea is that getting an accurate ADHD diagnosis and pairing it with the right medication can help you get your taxes done on time.
It will also help you remember to pay your rent, take out the trash, and maybe even finish that romantasy novel you’ve been working on, and may eventually help you live longer
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