Event: The Salvesen Lecture 2024: Associate Professor Lotta Borg Skoglund

Senior consultant physician and associate professor at Uppsala University, Sweden and a leading expert on girls/women with ADHD/autism, Lotta is co founder and medical director of Letterlife.se - the world's first digital tool and platform for women with ADHD/autism. She also leads an international research group on how hormones affect mental health across the female lifespan.

Most of what is known about the challenges of living with a neurodiverse brain comes from research on boys and men.

• Neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD, ADD and autism are less likely to be diagnosed and treated in females, due to a difference in symptom display, comorbidity, and societal gender expectations.
• Girls and young women with ADHD, ADD and autism (AuDHD) mask their difficulties and compensate with energy consuming strategies. They are not invisible if we know what to ask for and listen to.
• When girls turn up on our radar as adolescent women with increasing impairments due to academic and social failures, severe psychosocial suffering and risk-taking behaviors, we paradoxically fail them again.
• Adult neurodivergent women struggle as parents, partners and in the workplace. Many are marked by severe PMS/PMDD, pain conditions, high risk pregnancies, postpartum periods and career challenges.
• Few aging neurodivergent women are adequately diagnosed. Still they exist and struggle with the same difficulties as younger women. They may also be more affected by the physical and cognitive changes across perimenopause and menopause, but there is almost no research or clinical guidelines to rely on.

To decrease stigma, ameliorate suffering, and improve the outcomes in girls and women with ADHD we need to better understand the underlying mechanisms causing their lives to be an uphill struggle from early childhood through the lifespan.

As US First Lady Michelle Obama so adequately expressed it: “We can measure a society by how it treats its girls and women”. Leaving the girls and women hanging will affect physical and mental health in society for generations to come!

In this presentation, Lotta walks us through the neuroscience and epidemiology behind female ADHD, addressing key knowledge gaps associated with vulnerable hormonal periods across the female reproductive life, and suggesting what needs to be done.