People with ADHD face more than issues with attention, focus, and impulses: It’s a serious condition that may take years off a person’s life.
For the 5 percent of children and 2.5 percent of adults who have ADHD, the way their brains work means they struggle with tasks that require focus and planning.
Sometimes, that can look like forgetting an appointment, misplacing the car keys, or drinking too much on a work night. Those ‘blips’ are harmless enough, though they can compound over a lifetime.
A lapse in focus can lead to traffic accidents; a missed appointment can delay healthcare treatment; a tendency to give in to impulses can make bad habits harder to quit.
At the most serious end of things, people with ADHD face a higher risk of an early death.
A large review published in JAMA Network Open offers strong new evidence of the link between ADHD and mortality from any cause, as well as from suicide, injury, or natural causes.
The review also suggests ADHD medication may reduce the risk of early death among those living with the disorder.
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Researchers from institutions across the UK reviewed 19 existing studies published between 2012 and 2025. Each study had a slightly different research focus and was conducted in populations from across the world: the US, Canada, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK, Finland, and Denmark.
But all of them examined mortality patterns related to ADHD or its treatment.
Together, that data spans more than 15.9 million participants, a sample size that researchers can rarely achieve in a single study. Pooling results from multiple studies can help researchers identify patterns that are less likely to occur due to random chance.
This is why reviews and meta-analyses like this are so valuable: Scientists can look across multiple studies to find prevailing trends or potential outliers in the research.
The data from 12 of these studies were pooled together to calculate hazard ratios based on the death statistics for people with and without ADHD.
The results reiterate the risks of leaving ADHD undiagnosed or untreated.
People with ADHD had a 70 percent higher hazard of death from any cause than people without the condition.
The risk of death from suicide was 90 percent higher among people with ADHD. Their risk of death from unintentional or intentional injury was 50 percent higher, and even the risk of death from natural causes was 30 percent higher.
These findings generally agree with the results of an earlier review, except for the part about deaths from natural causes. The earlier review did not find evidence for higher mortality from natural causes among folks with ADHD.
“This difference may reflect the inclusion of more recently published studies or differences in the studies and effect estimates included,” the authors suggest.
The good news is that prescription medications used to treat ADHD are associated with a lower risk of death from any cause in ADHD populations.
The study doesn’t distinguish between the effects of different medications, but generally, stimulants are the drugs prescribed for ADHD.
The methods used for this research are not intended to show cause and effect: We can’t say that ADHD is the cause of these mortality rates, nor that ADHD medication caused the reduction in mortality rates.
The authors also saw a lot of variation between studies, which might be related to factors like the balance of gender in study populations, the cultural attitudes and healthcare services in different countries, and changes in ADHD diagnosis and management over the past decade or so.
“Pooled estimates should be interpreted as average associations across diverse populations and study contexts rather than as being universally applicable,” the authors note.
“The current evidence suggests that there are multiple factors that may increase risk for mortality outcomes in people with ADHD, reinforcing the importance of support for managing health risks in this population and attention to addressing structural determinants of poor health disproportionately experienced by people with ADHD,” the authors conclude.
The research has been published in JAMA Network Open.
This article was fact-checked by Peter Dockrill and edited by Peter Dockrill. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
