Do ADHD Adults Really Lose 3 Weeks of Work Each Year?

Do ADHD Adults Really Lose 3 Weeks of Work Each Year?

A new study claims they do.

It’s estimated that approximately 70% to 80% of all children will carry their attention problems into adulthood. According to the new study, this could present problems for their employers. The study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that ADHD adults worked 22.1 days less than other workers each year. Furthermore, the study found that they were unable to carry out normal work activities an average of 8.4 days per year, 21.7 days of reduced work quantity and 13.6 days of reduced work quality.

The study of 7,075 workers in ten countries was performed by the World Health Organization (“WHO”) research consortium at Harvard Medical School in Boston Medicine and partially subsidized by pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly. The WHO claims that an average of 3.5 per cent had ADHD.

Strangely enough, adult ADHD workers in the Netherlands actually showed improved job performance – exactly contradictory to all other trends in the study. The researchers explained this as an aberration. Historically, the Netherlands medicates persons for ADHD far less than other countries and has a particularly different perspective on attention problems.

This study tends to corroborate Dr. Joseph Biederman’s work (oddly enough, he’s with Harvard University too) that indicates ADHD adults collectively lose $77 billion each year due to workplace failure.