ADHD and Menopause: What Really Happens When Midlife Meets Neurodiversity

Friday, November 14, 2025.

There are moments in a woman’s life when medicine suddenly remembers she exists.

Menopause isn’t usually one of them.

ADHD in women isn’t either. But put the two together and you enter a research vacuum so deep it makes the Grand Canyon look cramped.

Yet here we are—finally—staring at a study that tries to map what really happens when ADHD and menopause occupy the same hormonal real estate.

It’s messy. It’s counterintuitive. And it tells us more about how women interpret their bodies than anything we’ve learned in decades.

The newest work, published in the Journal of Attention Disorders, forces us to climb out of the cultural fog around “women’s issues” and look directly at what’s been hiding in plain sight.

Women with ADHD aren’t just navigating distractibility—they’re navigating an entire history of being overlooked, misdiagnosed, and expected to tough out biological experiences men receive sympathy medals for.

The fact that it took until 2025 for someone to study this intersection says more about medicine than it does about women.

Why This Study Matters: Finally Looking at Women’s Brains in Midlife

The Dommett research team didn’t ask complicated questions.

They simply wanted to know whether women with ADHD struggle more during menopause than women without ADHD.

The assumption—shared by many clinicians—was yes.

After all, menopause delivers its own cognitive circus: brain fog, memory glitches, irritability, sleep changes, emotional volatility. It looks suspiciously like ADHD wearing a menopausal cardigan.

And yet the study found that women with ADHD did not report worse menopausal symptoms than women without ADHD. Not worse mood changes. Not worse concentration issues. Not worse physical discomfort.

This wasn’t a tiny pilot study. It was 656 midlife women, 245 with ADHD. That’s a serious sample in an area where “studies” usually involve someone’s dissertation and eight exhausted participants.

Even Dommett herself expressed surprise. It contradicted the expectation shared by almost everyone who works with ADHD in women.

But the real story was hiding inside the correlations.

Across the entire sample, higher ADHD symptom scores were associated with worse menopausal complaints—anxiety, mood disturbances, cognitive challenges, physical symptoms, and diminished quality of life.

These correlations were actually stronger among women without ADHD, and weaker among women with ADHD, especially those taking medication.

If your eyebrows are up, you’re not alone. This is not what anyone predicted.

The Interpretation Problem: When ADHD Becomes the Default Framework

Women with ADHD spend a lifetime interpreting their difficulties through one lens: “This is my ADHD.”

Forgetfulness, distractibility, losing words mid-sentence, walking into a room and forgetting why—these are old roommates, not new intruders.

So when menopause arrives with its own neurological chaos, many women with ADHD interpret those changes as “more of what I already know,” not “menopause is intensifying my symptoms.”

Women without ADHD have no such narrative.

When midlife hits, they enter a cognitive landscape they’ve never seen before.

To them, the symptoms feel sudden, dramatic, and menopause-specific. Their reporting reflects the shock of newness.

This study shows that experience and interpretation are inseparable. Women don’t just report symptoms—they contextualize them. And, as I’m so fond of pointing out ad nauseam, context changes everything.

How This Contradicts (and Complements) Prior Research

Older clinical observations—and plenty of anecdotal writing—suggested women with ADHD struggle significantly more during menopause.

Even the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Women’s Mental Health pointed to an increased vulnerability to hormonally mediated mood disturbances in women with ADHD.

Small-scale studies, many cited heavily in the early 2020s, described women with ADHD facing heightened anxiety, irritability, and executive dysfunction during perimenopause.

So what’s going on?

Two things.

First, it’s important to note that those earlier claims weren’t usually based on direct comparisons between ADHD and non-ADHD groups.

They relied on samples of women with ADHD, clinical impressions, or small cohorts without clear controls.

Second, newer comprehensive reviews—like the excellent synthesis published in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health—note that the entire field of female ADHD research is decades behind where it should be.

In other words, women are underdiagnosed, understudied, and profoundly mischaracterized in clinical literature—even now.

This study was the very first to compare the groups properly and to recognize the psychological complexity of interpreting overlapping symptoms.

The Biology: Estrogen, Dopamine, and the Cognitive Middle Passage

Frankly, the biological story is almost too elegant.

Estrogen supports dopamine transmission, executive functioning, attention regulation, and working memory. During perimenopause, estrogen levels fluctuate like a toddler who refuses to sit still. Cognitive changes follow.

This looks almost identical to ADHD.

Which is why clinicians have spent years telling women with new midlife cognitive symptoms that they “might have ADHD but also might be menopausal,” which is medical shorthand for “we don’t actually know.”

Meanwhile, women with ADHD often report symptom intensification during the premenstrual phase, another time of estrogen fluctuation.

Researchers studying PMDD and postpartum mood disorders have pointed to similar patterns.

Yet researchers have done a surprisingly piss-poor job tracking how ADHD and declining estrogen interact in the long, slow descent into menopause—until now.

This is what makes the Dommett study so compelling and provocative: biologically, you’d expect women with ADHD to be hit harder.

But subjectively, they don’t report it.

Once again, interpretation becomes the missing variable.

When Menopause Unmasks ADHD Nobody Noticed

One of the least discussed truths in women’s mental health is that menopause often exposes ADHD symptoms that were previously masked by intelligence, coping skills, perfectionism, or pure effort.

A woman who spent decades “managing” suddenly can’t. Her working memory collapses. Her organizational ability disintegrates. Her emotional reactivity spikes.

She often assumes it’s “just menopause.”
Providers often assume the same.

This is how thousands of women receive their first ADHD diagnosis in their 40s and 50s.

And it’s why interpretation matters so profoundly—not only for women with ADHD, but for the women who always had it and never knew.

This emerging diagnostic pipeline is supported by multiple clinical summaries, including widely shared overviews in Medical News Today, and echoed in the large literature review in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health.

The Dommett study doesn’t undermine the women who struggle more during menopause—it simply shows that diagnosis changes how symptoms are framed, understood, and reported. The distress is real in either case.

Medication: The Unexpected Buffer

This study suggests something intriguing: women with ADHD who are taking medication show weaker correlations between ADHD symptoms and menopausal complaints.

Medication might be doing more than treating ADHD—it may be stabilizing executive functioning enough to prevent menopausal symptoms from spiraling.

Or it might simply give women a vocabulary and structure for managing cognitive changes as they emerge.

Either way, these research finding deserve some serious follow-up.

FAQ: What Women Want to Know but Rarely Get Clear Answers To

Is it ADHD or menopause?
Sometimes it’s both. Sometimes one unmasks the other. The overlap is real and confusing, and the Dommett study finally acknowledges that women deserve better than guesswork.

Can menopause make ADHD worse?
Clinically, yes—many women report intensification during perimenopause. The new study complicates this by showing the effect depends on diagnosis, interpretation, and medication.

Can ADHD medication still work during menopause?
The study hints that medication may buffer symptoms. More research is needed, but the early signal is promising.

Could I have had ADHD my whole life without knowing?
Absolutely. Many midlife women receive diagnoses for the first time when their hormonal scaffolding shifts and coping mechanisms collapse.

Should providers treat ADHD and menopause separately?
No. That’s probably a recipe for misdiagnosis. These conditions interact and should be evaluated together.

Final Thoughts

This study doesn’t give us a neat answer, and thank God for that.

Women’s brains aren’t neat. Women’s experiences aren’t neat.

And the idea that menopause plus ADHD should produce predictable misery was always an oversimplification born more from cultural stereotyping than evidence.

What the Dommett study gives us instead is needed sense of nuance—finally.

Women with ADHD aren’t “suffering less” in menopause.

They’re interpreting their experience differently, living with different baselines, and making sense of their symptoms through a lifetime of navigating a neurodevelopmental condition medicine barely acknowledges in adult women.

This is the story:
Not that ADHD and menopause collide, but that women have long been expected to navigate that collision alone.

Now the evidence is starting to catch up.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Chapman, L., Gupta, K., Hunter, M. S., & Dommett, E. J. (2025). Examining the link between ADHD symptoms and menopausal experiences: A cross-sectional study of midlife women. Journal of Attention Disorders. Advance online publication.

Kooij, J. J. S., Bijlenga, D., & Asherson, P. (2025). Research advances and future directions in female ADHD. Frontiers in Global Women’s Health. Advance online publication.

Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Women’s Mental Health. (2021). Are women with ADHD at increased risk for hormonally mediated mood disorders? Center for Women’s Mental Health at MGH. Retrieved November 24, 2025, from https://womensmentalhealth.org

Medical News Today. (2024). ADHD and menopause: What to know. Retrieved November 24, 2025, from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com

PsyPost. (2025). Exploring the interaction between menopause and ADHD symptoms in midlife women. Retrieved November 24, 2025, from https://www.psypost.org