Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people in the UK in each age group were diagnosed with ADHD in each of the last five years.

The information requested is not collected centrally.

There are no plans to collect this data. This may be because it can be difficult to diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is very common for the core problems of ADHD in children to present together with other developmental impairments and/or mental health problems. There are many rather non-specific problems that are very common in ADHD, and can even be used, incorrectly, as grounds for the diagnosis. The problems associated with ADHD appear in different ways at different ages.