is adhd related to autism?

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when you click on the forums, it gives an explanation under each section.
How come under General Autism Discussion it says

"General Autism Discussion
Talk about anything that has at least something to do with Autism, Asperger's, ADHD, and life. Other unrelated discussion belongs in the Random Discussion forum."

is adhd related to autism?

Some theories posit a connection between the two.

NO, IN NO WAY!!

I was at a genetics of autism and ADHD conference last year, they said they autism and ADHD overlaps - that people can have both and there is also likely to be a genetic overlap too i.e shared genes. Some conference attendees said autism and ADHD, is part of the same broad spectrum.

Both AD(H)D and Autism are among the core ingredients of the Neurodiversity Spectrum.
Neurodiversity Spectrum Conditions tend to group together within the same people.
Some studies suggest that as much as 70% of the autistic population also meets the criteria for an AD(H)D diagnosis.

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I seriously think so...as a very ADD-ish person myself..who is assessed as having Asperger's.
I think that TRUE ADD is related to autism....but I think that maybe a lot of kids who get diagnosed as having ADD don't necc. have true ADD..they are just raised in over-processed overstimulating environments and whatnot...
My partner's niece is a neurotypical little girl...she lives in the suburbs and gets fed lots of sugar and plastic and stuff...and she acts up...She has an interesting and adventurous imagination, but I am pretty sure she is neurotypical...at least she seems so to me....but maybe I am not the best judge...she makes eye-contact...has no communication problems...she is just restless and precocious, and her mom is talking about putting her on ADD meds...That is my example of someone who does not have true ADD.

I grew up in a fog. It took me forever to do things properly like brush my teeth regularly and tie my shoes and stop wetting the bed and stop drinking from a bottle...and dress myself in an appropriate manner...Understand proper boundaries and whatnot...

In class I COULD NOT pay attention to what the teacher was saying...I was too overwhelmed by the sound of the air conditioner and the flickering of the florescent lights and all the junk that was happening in my head to concentrate...I was going home constantly from stress and sensory issue related problems...but I discovered that I loved to read books and collect information and memorize muscials..and though I absorbed nothing in the classroom, I could read and comprehend a lot better than my fellow classmates who did not have all the problems that I had, and I scored really really high on all the aptitude tests...Top 1%...But I continued to do very poorly in school...because I was extremely disorganized and could not concentrate on what I was supposed to do...I could absorb lots of info on something I was really interested in...but there was lots of stuff that went straight over my head...
These are the issues that led me to find ADD...and for years I read books on ADD and was addicted to ADD forums and whatnot... before I had even heard of AS...and there are lots of people on those forums and lots of issues covered in those books that i could totally relate to....

That is why I think that (real) ADD is related to the autistic spectrum.

I got ADHD and AS

I think there's no way to know for sure unless there's more reliable research and diagnostics. There are particular populations of both (females in particular) that are rarely diagnosed or only recently started being diagnosed. I think that they realized longer ago about the differences in how ADHD manifests in girls than they did about AS, and since there are things that can seem to overlap about them, it seems likely to me that there are an awful lot of people misdiagnosed. There are certainly some attention problems inherent in AS (like inability to focus on anything that you're not obsessed with,) so chances are a lot of people are diagnosed with ADHD who may just have AS. I remember reading awhile ago some theory about "ADHD with hyper-focusing." I'm fairly certain that what they actually meant was AS, but didn't know it because they'd never considered an ASD as a possible diagnosis.

I kinda consider it a wild goose chase to study the similarities between two conditions when you can't really get a decent representative sample of either, let alone a sample of those that overlap. Especially considering that as it stands, they're mutually exclusive. They're planning on changing that in the next DSM, but for now, you can't technically be "officially" diagnosed with both anyway.

Like others have said, autism and ADHD often go together, or one may be misdiagnosed for the other. They are also possibly genetically linked. I can't speak for the administrator, but I think he may've written that to make clear related/comorbid conditions can be discussed as well and it's not just all about autism.

I have Asperger's and ADHD. It is sometimes hard to tell if a trait is Asperger's or ADHD. People with Asperger's tend to not be anle to pay attention to something they're interested in. It can be confusing if a behavior is ADHD or Asperger's. My form of stimming is pacing. This can be argued as either ADHD or Asperger's.

No. Aspies can sometimes be misdiagnosed as having adhd. My dad was.

ADHD is considered to be (genetically) related to autism. In the IT industry, both are common. The ADHD guys tend to be the HTML and Web design guys, while the aspies are the object-oriented programmers and systems administrators. I am diagnosed with both ADHD and Aspergers, and I am pretty sure the diagnosis is correct. ADHD is not common in women -- women usually have ADD without the H -- but I must say, I actually like my H! If it weren't for that, I would probably quite fat!

I have a few cousins on both sides of the family who have AD(H)D, some undiagnosed. I am the only aspie amongst my relatives, but I am pretty sure my paternal grandmother (who died before I was born) was an aspie too, based on her diaries and on how she was described to me by my mother.

This is new to me, but it does make a lot of sense.
Oh... So you do both Web design and object-oriented programming?

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I think ADD/ADHD is linked with some, but not all, cases of autistic spectrum disorders. I myself feel I have some traits of ADD/ADHD (my parents also think this), but do not meet the criteria to be diagnosed and given medication.

Haha, I didn't say I worked in IT!

My job entails a diversity of activities, but strictly speaking, no. I occasionally do Web development and I also sometimes do coding in a high-level language called @Formula Language, which sits on top of a variant of VBScript; and sometimes a bit of database/systems admin, but I don't officially "work in IT".

Deficits in executive function and working memory are the core mental processes that cause ADHD symptoms. Those same mental processes are part of Asperger's. My opinion is that it is very likely that someone with Asperger's has some ADHD type symptoms, but someone with just ADHD isn't as likely to have Asperger's symptoms.

There are attention issues in both conditions, but they present differently. Someone with just ADHD will have issues staying focused because they are being distracted. They may hear noises that others don't because their brain isn't automatically filtering out information that may not be relevant. Lacking that automatic filtering can also lead to creativity and out of the box thinking. No information, idea, or train of thought is being missed because the brain automatically filtered it out.

Someone with Asperger's will have issues staying focused on what everyone else is focused on because they don't naturally stay in line with what everyone else is attending to. But the person with Aspergers can have that issue pluss the distractability attention issues of ADHD that are due to lacking automatic filtering.

This is just my opinion based my understanding from the research I've done on the two conditions.