Description:
Attention-Defcit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is young children's most common mental health disorder. We aim to provide causal estimates of the diferential costs for the non-adult population with ADHD. We used longitudinal administrative data covering the non-adult population over fve years and diferent healthcare providers (general practitioners, hospitalisations and emergency departments, visits to mental healthcare centres-day-care or hospi‑ tals) of 1,101,215 individuals in Catalonia (Spain). We also include the consumption of pharmaceuticals and cognitive therapies. We instrumented ADHD diagnosis by the probability of being diagnosed by the most visited healthcare provider based on individual monthly visits to the provider in which this visit was related to ADHD and the density of professionals in the diferent mental health providers. After using matching procedures to include a proper control group, we estimated two-part and fnite mixture models. Our results indicate that ADHD children and adolescents displayed 610€ higher annual health direct costs compared to not diagnosed counterparts. We provide average costs disentangling the sample by age boundaries, gender, and comorbidities to ofer values for cost-efective analyses and incremental costs after diagnosis, which is around 400€. A signifcant diferential annual direct health cost for the non-adult population with ADHD is determined, which will be helpful for cost-efectiveness analysis and complete cost-of-illness studies.