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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Getting assessed and diagnosed
That matters if you are an adult wondering whether you would even qualify. The old cut-off was itself a compromise between studies pointing in different directions, and the newer one was chosen from a range that went as high as sixteen. If your difficulties were plainly there in your school years but you cannot pin them to a particular birthday, that is a normal situation for an assessor to work with rather than a disqualification.
We have knowledge only of what You have taught us (Quran 2:32). The angels say it about themselves, and it is a fair thing to remember about any human system for sorting people.
البقرة
قَالُواْ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ لَا عِلۡمَ لَنَآ إِلَّا مَا عَلَّمۡتَنَآۖ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ ٱلۡحَكِيمُ
They said, ‘May You be glorified! We have knowledge only of what You have taught us. You are the All Knowing and All Wise.’
Qur’an 2:32read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A population based birth cohort followed people from childhood and found that many impaired young adults with ADHD symptoms had no documented childhood onset disorder, which sits awkwardly with the assumption that a valid diagnosis always needs clear childhood evidence. It is one cohort, and it opens the question rather than settling it. What it does support is looking carefully at a person's history instead of stopping at a date.
Caye A, Rocha TB, Anselmi L, Murray J, Menezes AM, Barros FC, Gonçalves H, Wehrmeister F, Jensen CM, Steinhausen HC, Swanson JM, Kieling C, Rohde LA. (2016). Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Trajectories From Childhood to Young Adulthood: Evidence From a Birth Cohort Supporting a Late-Onset Syndrome.. JAMA psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Knowing a threshold was chosen rather than discovered stops you treating it as a ruling on whether your experience is real.
Not every bout of eating too much belongs to an eating disorder. Ask whether how the body looks is part of it, because that is where the two paths separate.
Two referrals turn up again and again. A young child being asked to leave a school for behaviour, with no developmental or cognitive information anywhere in the file. And a parent saying something is wrong while the school says everything is fine. Both are describing adult frustration rather than a formulation.
When you read that some proportion of people with ADHD have a particular problem, the number tells you nothing until you know the figure for everybody else.