Question: Hello, Dr. Barkley! Your work is greatly appreciated in the ADHD community. Thank you for everything you do.  
    
  I'd like to ask: what study, on people with ADHD, yielded the most fascinating or surprising results to you?
Answer: If you study something for 49 years as I have since 1973, you will be surprised more than once.  So I will give you two that stand out understanding there were others as well.  First, that ADHD greatly disrupts the  human sense of time and especially the ability to be governed by ones sense of time passing (time management).  I came upon the idea to test it by reading an essay on how animal and human minds and language/communication may differ.  From it I learned that disinhibition is related to sense of time.  So I tested it first in ADHD in children, then later in teens, adults, and my 25 year follow up study.  People at any age with ADHD were very impaired in time management and time sense.  No one had ever said that or predicted it until then.  And it was not a subtle but a massive deficit, especially when we measured it through ratings of time sense and time management, not just lab measures.  I was blown away.  Now its a rock solid finding in the ADHD literature and led me to coin the term time blind or future myopia for the condition.
  
  The second one came in late 2018-2019.  I have always suspected that ADHD adversely affects health, and we knew it caused more accidental injuries and even early mortality from them.  But in my longitudinal study in Milwaukee we were documenting all kinds of health and medical issues as the kids became adults, from obesity, poor nutrition, impaired sleep, increased smoking, excess alcohol use, poor driving, lousy cholesterol panels, etc.  But in that year I found a way to combine all that information into a calculator that can estimate life expectancy based on 14 human factors.  No one had studied that before.  But we had all 14 of those factors in my study.  The results from the calculations were stunning and sobering.  I had to run them a second time and check all the data entry to make sure we made no mistakes.  We had not.  A diagnosis of ADHD in childhood was associated with a 9-10 year reduction in life expectancy and if the condition persisted to age 27 the reduction was 12-13 years.  That is huge!  Greater than any major health variable we try to change in people these days so they live longer.  Why, because  ADHD is predisposing to many such adverse lifestyle and health factors that all add up to a considerable reduction in lifespan if not treated.  So that was my second surprise.  Thanks for asking
content: Q: Hello, Dr. Barkley! Your work is greatly appreciated in the ADHD community. Thank you for everything you do.  
    
  I'd like to ask: what study, on people with ADHD, yielded the most fascinating or surprising results to you?
   Ans: If you study something for 49 years as I have since 1973, you will be surprised more than once.  So I will give you two that stand out understanding there were others as well.  First, that ADHD greatly disrupts the  human sense of time and especially the ability to be governed by ones sense of time passing (time management).  I came upon the idea to test it by reading an essay on how animal and human minds and language/communication may differ.  From it I learned that disinhibition is related to sense of time.  So I tested it first in ADHD in children, then later in teens, adults, and my 25 year follow up study.  People at any age with ADHD were very impaired in time management and time sense.  No one had ever said that or predicted it until then.  And it was not a subtle but a massive deficit, especially when we measured it through ratings of time sense and time management, not just lab measures.  I was blown away.  Now its a rock solid finding in the ADHD literature and led me to coin the term time blind or future myopia for the condition.
  
  The second one came in late 2018-2019.  I have always suspected that ADHD adversely affects health, and we knew it caused more accidental injuries and even early mortality from them.  But in my longitudinal study in Milwaukee we were documenting all kinds of health and medical issues as the kids became adults, from obesity, poor nutrition, impaired sleep, increased smoking, excess alcohol use, poor driving, lousy cholesterol panels, etc.  But in that year I found a way to combine all that information into a calculator that can estimate life expectancy based on 14 human factors.  No one had studied that before.  But we had all 14 of those factors in my study.  The results from the calculations were stunning and sobering.  I had to run them a second time and check all the data entry to make sure we made no mistakes.  We had not.  A diagnosis of ADHD in childhood was associated with a 9-10 year reduction in life expectancy and if the condition persisted to age 27 the reduction was 12-13 years.  That is huge!  Greater than any major health variable we try to change in people these days so they live longer.  Why, because  ADHD is predisposing to many such adverse lifestyle and health factors that all add up to a considerable reduction in lifespan if not treated.  So that was my second surprise.  Thanks for asking