Can this explain late diagnosis?

[roseblood]

Hi I've just had to rush in here and type this out quickly because an idea that seems like it should be really obvious has just dawned on me!

Some of you are probably familiar with this finding, that children who are the youngest in a class are much more likely to get diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest in the class: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/0...-be-diagnosed/

Well the focus is all on how children born at a certain time of year are getting misdiagnosed with ADHD because they're being compared unfavourably with their supposed 'peer group' whose average age is significantly higher in months than their own age.

But what about the equally distorted comparisons that are getting made between the OLDEST in the class and the 'class average'? Surely, if it's not fair to compare a child's abilities with those of groups of children with a higher average age and conclude that their brain is not developing normally, it's equally unfair to compare a child's abilities with those of YOUNGER children and conclude that their brain IS developing within the normal range?

Could this explain why so many of us report that we didn't really fall behind our peers until later in our school career or even until we left school? High intelligence is the most commonly given explanation, but on its own that has never explained to me why my inability to cope with demands seemed to EXPLODE as I approached adulthood. It wasn't that my attention got worse, it was just that everyone else's seemed to improve so much they left me in the dust.

As we get older, neurological change slows down, so the difference a year makes shrinks and shrinks. There is far more of a neurological and cognitive difference between a six month old baby and a 12 month old baby, than there is between a 17 year old and a 17 and a half year old. The difference is still very significant when you're seven or eight though.

So, as the class gets older and everyone's brains are getting closer to full maturity, the older ADHD brain, which isn't going to reach normal full maturity by adulthood (a third apparently DO reach normal maturity after a delay of several years, but most don't) increasingly stands out against the younger brains that it lagged behind somewhat less noticeably when the age gap was more significant.

What do you think? Can any of our scientist members get this possibility across to the relevant institutions, because I'm not seeing any evidence that it's getting discussed at all, and awareness of it could help shape future diagnostic criteria and diagnostic practice so that fewer children get overlooked and fewer adults get told their ADHD didn't manifest early enough.

[roseblood]

Posting because again because it's too late to edit. When I said this:

Could this explain why so many of us report that we didn't really fall behind our peers until later in our school career or even until we left school?

A better way to word it would have been 'why so many of us report that our trouble meeting life's demands got much worse later in our school career or even after we left school'.

I didn't mean to imply that I had no more ADHD symptoms than most of my class when younger; I was always one of the least attentive in every class. It's the starkness of the difference and the trouble it causes that often seems to increase, for whatever reasons.

[rockydaydreamer]

I don't have a clue if there's any correlation, this only made me think about how most people start kindergarten before their 5th birthday.. but what happens if your birthday is in the summer? Do you start kindergarden when you only just turned 4 like a few months ago? Well I guess the rule is you start when your 4.. lol... I think too much.

My birthday was in May, so I suppose I was a fairly young 4 year old when I started kindergarden 4 months later. Most of kids may have turned 4 the previous fall and probably would turn 5 within the school year...

...no wait, I forgot the question.... dang it, I just went off on a tangent..

Okay, so yeah, I just realized I may have been one of the youngest and I was diagnosed late.
I'm 24 years old and was just diagnosed this summer.

This is one of the only posts where I had to actually had to think about it... lol

I also voted wrong because I didn't really take the time to think about if I may have been younger than most in my grade level.

[Conman]

i was born in april, i put 'somewhere in middle' cuz i couldnt tell if thats more on the young side or nto since theres quite a few may and some early june people

[Flory]

i was born in july..very much a baby of the class :P

[jasondega]

In my case, I had a mother who suffered from severe epilepsy and several developmental disorders. So during my childhood the focus was so much on taking care of my mother that I don't think anyone really had time to notice I had ADHD.

There were a few signs... I was put in special learning support classes for reading in 3rd and 4th grade... but then by the end of the 4th grade year I was reading on a college level and they attributed my early problems with reading to my being "gifted" and just bored with the material. Looking back I'm sure it was the ADHD. If you put me in a room full of other kids I couldn't focus, but in the one on one learning support class I could do it.

Anyhow, the info about birth dates affecting diagnosis is interesting.