ADHD Ad Doesn't Add Up

Iwanted to comment on the Shire advertisement that appeared on page 7 of the July 6 issue. The advertisement is troubling to me; it implies that 1 out of 5 depressed men is diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I checked the study that Shire cited, “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Childhood Among Adults With Major Depression” by Jonathan E. Alpert, et al., which was published in the June 1, 1996, Psychiatry Research. The study noted that only 9 out of 116 adult male and female subjects met full childhood ADHD criteria; 10 out of 116 met only partial criteria. If you accept the total number of true ADHD subjects as 19 out of 116, you get 16 percent. By my math, this is 1 out of 6, not 1 out of 5.

I don't see data broken down for gender, but the authors noted that over 50 percent of those with ADHD were female; so if anything, the data indicate that it was fewer than 1 in 6 males who were diagnosed with ADHD as children. Further, the study noted that only 12 percent of both the male and female subjects reported having symptoms as an adult; 16 percent reported only childhood symptoms. The advertisement implies that 1 in 5 men have ADHD.