The diagnosis of ADHD in children and adolescents with epilepsy: a scoping review

ABSTRACT

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is often diagnosed in children and adolescents with epilepsy, but clear clinical guidelines on how to make this diagnosis are still lacking. Without these guidelines, there is no consensus between specialists on how to proceed when assessing children with epilepsy for ADHD, which can negatively impact the quality of care being offered to this population. As a first step toward gaining more specific clinical guidelines, this scoping review was aimed at documenting the tools and procedures used to diagnose ADHD in children and adolescents with epilepsy over time and at determining whether the diagnoses were made in accordance with clinical guidelines and recommendations. The literature search was conducted using PsycINFO, PubMed, and CINAHL. Studies were included if conducted with children and adolescents aged between 4 and 18 years with epilepsy being evaluated for ADHD. Studies were clustered according to their publication date and the reported diagnostic procedures were identified. Forty-nine out of 3854 records were included. Results highlight discrepancies between how ADHD was diagnosed in reviewed studies and clinical guidelines or recommendations. Indeed, most studies did not use a multi-method and multi-informant approach when diagnosing ADHD in children with epilepsy, with no improvement over time. Future studies aimed at diagnosing ADHD in children and adolescents should ensure that they are following clinical guidelines and recommendations, in addition to adapting their diagnostic procedures to the presence of any neurological comorbidities, such as epilepsy.

KEYWORDS:

• ADHD
• epilepsy
• diagnosis
• children
• adolescents

Acknowledgments

While working on the manuscript, S. Gionet was supported by a graduate scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. V. Plourde is supported by the Interdisciplinary Research Chair in Children and Youth Mental Health, Université de Moncton. We would like to thank Cynthia Goguen, research professional, for reviewing the data extraction spreadsheet as well as Marc Harper, librarian, for helping with the elaboration of the literature search.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open practice statement

All relevant study materials and the data are available on the Open Science Framework project page: https://osf.io/23uhb (Gionet et al., 2024).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.