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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO056

The added value of objective measures in adult ADHD diagnosis: insights from an ongoing systematic review

INCREMENTAL VALUE OF OBJECTIVE MEASURES IN ADULT ADHD DIAGNOSIS: INSIGHTS FROM AN ONGOING SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Objective measures are not reliable standalone diagnostic tests, but when added to clinical assessment, they significantly improve diagnostic certainty and the speed of decision-making.

The study aims to examine whether objective measures such as continuous performance tests (CPTs), QbTest, actigraphy, and virtual reality provide incremental diagnostic value beyond clinical assessment in adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and to assess their effects on clinical decision-making and service efficiency. A PubMed search from inception through 2026 identified 377 records. Titles and abstracts were screened by two independent reviewers, and 307 records were excluded (89 non-diagnostic studies, 77 with non-ADHD samples, 70 pediatric studies, 49 focused solely on treatment, 18 reviews, and 4 without objective tools). Seventy studies proceeded to full-text review (40 included, 30 pending). The preliminary synthesis is a narrative synthesis based on 40 studies published between 1997 and 2026. When used alone, CPTs show consistent sensitivity but limited specificity, performing poorly in distinguishing ADHD from other psychiatric conditions. When used alongside clinical assessment, however, they support ruling out ADHD, increase clinician confidence, and shorten the time to a diagnostic decision. In multimodal assessment combining CPTs with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and oculomotor measures, the reported area under the curve (AUC) for distinguishing ADHD from controls was 0.892, with a sensitivity of 80.3% and a specificity of 84.5%. In conclusion, objective measures should be positioned as adjunctive tools in complex or uncertain cases, rather than as gatekeeping screening tests; full-text review, QUADAS-2 risk-of-bias assessment, and expansion of the search to PsycINFO and Embase are ongoing.

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