Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is suffering a fivefold surge in people seeking autism assessments since the Wuhan virus pandemic and shortages of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) medications.
Research by the Nuffield Trust put the number of people waiting for an autism diagnosis from the socialized healthcare provider in December 2023 at 172,000. This compares to 32,320 in December 2019, before the onset of the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns and vaccine rollouts.
Over half of the people waiting to see an autism specialist are children or teenagers, implying increased difficulties for parents and schools — and for the children themselves, who often cannot secure extra support until they have had a formal diagnosis.
Guidelines stress people should not have to wait more than three months for a diagnosis, but the number of people who have been waiting at least 13 weeks stood at 147,070 in December 2023, up from 24,250 in 2019.
The parallel shortage in ADHD medications is likely to have been driven in part by a 146 percent increase in adults aged 30-34 who are receiving drugs to ameliorate the disorder.
“The extraordinary, unpredicted and unprecedented rise in demand for autism assessments and ADHD treatments have completely overtaken the NHS’s capacity to meet them,” said Nuffield Trust chief executive Thea Stein.
“It is frankly impossible to imagine how the system can grow fast enough to fulfill this demand.”
In total, around 1.2 million people in the United Kingdom are currently diagnosed as autistic, and 2.2 million are diagnosed with ADHD.
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