ADHD Doubles Death Risk in Adults with Type 2 Diabetes, Landmark

Adults with type 2 diabetes who also have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder face more than double the risk of dying after their diabetes diagnosis, according to a landmark multinational cohort study published in BMC Medicine. Researchers pooled health data from seven countries—Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States—covering nearly two million adults over about a decade. The team identified 1,929,027 people first diagnosed with type 2 diabetes between 2010 and 2020; about 47% were male. The headline finding was a hazard ratio of 2.42 for all-cause mortality (95% CI: 1.72–3.41) after adjustments for key confounders. ADHD was not consistently linked to major adverse cardiac events, with a pooled hazard ratio of 1.04 (95% CI: 0.81–1.35).