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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in adulthood

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr B Toone
King’s College London, Denmark Hill, London SE5 9RS, UK; brian.toone@btinternet.com

Keywords: tention deficit hyperactivity; child

Abbreviations: AD/HD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; ICD, International Classification of Diseases

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

A behavioural syndrome of childhood characterised by overactivity, excitability, and explosive behaviour has been recognised since the turn of the last century and is now thought to be, at certain ages, the most common disorder of childhood.¹ The disorder is now recognised in the terminology of ICD-10² as "hyperkinetic disorder", and in DSM-IV³ as "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" (AD/HD). The cardinal features of overactivity and impaired attention should be pervasive—that is, evident in more than one situation, and observable before the age of six (ICD-10) or seven years (DSM-IV), though they are usually evident well before that. DSM-IV subclassifies AD/HD into predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive–impulsive, and combined subtypes; ICD-10 insists on the presence of both inattention and hyperactivity for a diagnosis of hyperkinetic disorder.

EPIDEMIOLOGY
The prevalence varies according to which set of diagnostic criteria is used, DSM-IV or the more restrictive ICD-10. Using the latter, prevalence in . . . [Full text of this article]