The sudden rise of AuDHD: what is behind the rocketing rates of this life-changing diagnosis?

He had beaten more than 19,000applicants for a place at medical school, yet Khurram Sadiq was now bunking off his hospital shifts. The 19-year-old felt inexplicably anxious around strangers on the wards and was hiding from his own patients.During lectures he couldn’t focus on what he was being taught. He deemed himself “a goof, a dunce” in contrast to his peers. Sadiq couldn’t motivate himself to revise for his exams and instead found himself panic reading textbooks in the final days. He passed his undergraduate pre-medical exams by the skin of his teeth.That was 30 years ago. In the decades since, Dr

Sadiq has qualified as a consultant psychiatrist, been diagnosed with both autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),specialised in autism and ADHD psychiatry and met hundreds of patients with struggles similar to his. He is now trying to spread what was once an unbelievable message: that both autism and ADHD can coexist in the same person simultaneously.Just over a decade ago, the two conditions were considered to be mutually exclusive, with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often referred to as “psychiatry’s bible”, stating that the diagnosis of one precluded the existence of the other.This wasn’t revised until 2013. “It led to a fork in the road,” says Dr Jessica Eccles, spokesperson for the Royal College

of Psychiatrists. “Not only for clinical practice, but also for research and public understanding of these conditions.”Now some specialists believe that the coexistence of both conditions is not just possible, but frequent. One study by researchers at Duke University found that up to half of people