It is never just one thing. For adults with ADHD, the research documents what clinicians who work with this population already know intuitively: impairment does not stay contained within a single domain. An occupational setback becomes a relational strain. A relational strain becomes a depressive episode. A depressive episode compounds executive dysfunction — and the cycle continues. Bogdańska-Chomczyk et al. (2025) call this cascading impairment, and it is one of the most clinically significant — and most underaddressed — realities of adult ADHD in practice.

Somewhere between the research and the referral pad, adult ADHD got lost. Not because the science was weak — because the field was not looking. Cortese et al. (2025) confirm that up to 70% of individuals with childhood-onset ADHD continue to experience impairing symptoms as adults, even when full diagnostic criteria are no longer met. The clinical burden persists. What changes is how it presents — and how readily it gets missed.