By the time most Australians with AuDHD learn the word hypermobility, they have already visited a dozen specialists. The shoulder that dislocates in their sleep has been called clumsy. The stomach that refuses food has been called anxious. The dizziness on standing has been called deconditioning. The chronic fatigue has been called depression. Somewhere in the stack of letters from rheumatologists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists and GPs is a line nobody ever joins: has anyone considered this person might also be autistic or have ADHD?
A major new study published on 25 February 2026 in BMC Medicine says they should have. And it says the cost of not doing so is measurable in years of misdiagnosis, poorer physical and mental health, and a support system that treats bodies and brains as if they live in different buildings.
The study that finally names it
Catherine Crompton and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh recruited 1,754 adults with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) or hypermobility spectrum disorder (HSD) and asked them about diagnosis, symptoms, co-occurring conditions, self-rated physical and mental health, and their experience of the health system. About a quarter of respondents were autistic. Another quarter were not formally autistic but scored high on autistic traits. The comparison group was simply non-autistic adults with the same connective tissue condition.
The pattern was stark. Autistic participants reported more symptoms of hEDS/HSD and were more likely to have co-occurring physical and mental health conditions than either the high-trait group or non-autistic adults. They rated their own physical health worse. They rated their own mental health worse. And, most pointedly, the things that affected their mental health were different: autistic participants were most impacted by limitations to everyday activities, while non-autistic participants were most impacted by difficulties with self-care.
In plain language, the paper argues that autistic and non-autistic people experience the same connective tissue disorder differently and need different supports — a conclusion that cuts directly against a healthcare system built on one-size-fits-all pain pathways.
Why this is really an AuDHD story
The Crompton paper focuses on autism, but the underlying literature folds ADHD into the same bundle. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry by Csecs and colleagues set the template, finding that joint hypermobility links neurodivergence to dysautonomia and pain. Across 109 adults with autism, ADHD or tic disorders, rates of autonomic cardiovascular dysregulation and musculoskeletal pain clustered around the people whose joints moved too far in the wrong direction. A separate sample reported generalised hypermobility in 32% of ADHD adults, compared with 14% in a matched comparison group.
The numbers only get larger the closer researchers look. A 2025 review of 20 studies found that around 39% of clinically assessed autistic people meet criteria for EDS or HSD. More than half of participants across combined autism, ADHD and Tourette syndrome samples show elevated hypermobility, against roughly 20% in the general population. In adolescents with hEDS, ADHD rates climb from 35% at ages 15–16 to 46% by ages 17–18 — figures that dwarf any general-population estimate.
Put this alongside what we already know about AuDHD. Roughly 50–70% of autistic people also have ADHD. That means a very large share of Australians living with co-occurring autism and ADHD are also, statistically, living with a connective tissue phenotype that produces dislocating joints, chronic pain, fatigue, gastrointestinal dysmotility and orthostatic intolerance. Published specialist-clinic data report that the majority of autistic patients referred for autonomic assessment have a diagnosable autonomic condition. In other words, the AuDHD body is not a metaphor. It is a body that regulates temperature, heart rate, digestion and posture on a different setting to the textbook.
The Australian problem inside the international evidence
None of this new evidence is reaching most Australians in time. Ehlers-Danlos Australia and the Connective Tissue Disorders Network Australia both note that the average time from first symptoms to a hEDS or HSD diagnosis in Australia sits between 11 and 16 years. Research on the Australian experience of women seeking an EDS diagnosis, published in PLOS ONE in 2024, found repeated patterns of being dismissed, disbelieved and sent home by GPs and specialists who were not well informed about the condition.
For AuDHD Australians, that diagnostic slog compounds a slog they already know. Autism assessment in this country routinely costs $1,500–$3,500 out of pocket. Adult ADHD assessment can run $1,400 or more, with waiting lists of six to twelve months before GP-led diagnosis pathways in Queensland, NSW and Victoria began to open the door from late 2025 into 2026. Add a connective tissue disorder that nobody in the clinic has heard of, add pain that gets labelled ‘somatic’ or ‘functional’, and you have a person paying three separate diagnostic entry fees — one for the brain, one for the body, and one for the exhausted translator work of carrying both into the same consult.
The NDIS does not solve it. Ehlers-Danlos Australia openly describes hEDS as a condition that ‘doesn’t seem to easily fit into a perfect slot within the NDIS framework’. Eligibility requires proof of permanent, substantial functional impairment — which means most AuDHD people with hypermobility-driven fatigue and dysautonomia end up relying on Medicare-rebated physiotherapy and occupational therapy sessions they can only afford if they have private health cover and the executive function to book them. The October 2026 Thriving Kids rollout for under-8s doesn’t touch this cohort. The Disability Support Pension rarely does either.
What this costs, in real lives
The Crompton finding about different drivers of poor mental health is the part Australian clinicians most need to hear. If an autistic adult with hEDS is most hurt by limitations on activity — being unable to cook dinner because of gastroparesis, being unable to sit through a work meeting because of POTS-driven brain fog, being unable to wear shoes because of plantar instability — then the treatment that actually helps is environmental, not psychological. It is home-based occupational therapy. It is workplace accommodations. It is a cardiologist who takes autonomic symptoms seriously on the first visit. It is a physiotherapist who understands joint protection for someone who can’t reliably feel their own joint position, a well-documented interoceptive difference in both autism and ADHD.
Instead, the standard Australian pathway continues to route this person through general mental health care, where CBT-style interventions focus on ‘catastrophising about symptoms’ — an approach that mistakes accurate reporting of a dysautonomic nervous system for cognitive distortion. The 2025 Psychology Board of Australia competency requiring every registered psychologist to work in a neurodiversity-affirming way has not yet translated into specific guidance for clients whose neurodivergence arrives packaged with chronic pain. No Australian clinical guideline integrates the AADPA ADHD guideline, the National Autism Strategy 2025–2031, and the international hEDS diagnostic criteria.
What a joined-up system would do
There are shovel-ready changes that would cost very little. Primary care training on hypermobility — the sort of content already circulating in AusDoc GP education on hEDS — could add two screening questions to any adult ADHD or autism assessment: have you ever been told you are double-jointed, and do you have episodes of dizziness on standing? A positive answer on both, in a neurodivergent adult, is a reasonable prompt to refer to a rheumatologist or geneticist rather than to label the symptoms as anxiety. Reframing Autism in Australia has been making exactly this case through its public resource on hypermobility and pain management in autistic people.
Longer term, integrated AuDHD-plus-connective-tissue care would require the NDIS to acknowledge what the research already shows — that the physical and psychological experience of hEDS differs by neurotype, and that supports calibrated only to a non-autistic HSD profile will underserve a majority of neurodivergent applicants. It would require Medicare item numbers that allow a GP, physiotherapist and psychologist to share a care plan without the patient ferrying paper between them. It would require public hospital geneticist waitlists that don’t force patients into a $700 private appointment for a diagnosis they already self-identified years before.
The line worth keeping
There is an old joke inside the AuDHD community that every chronically unwell neurodivergent woman in Australia is one conversation away from crying in a GP’s office about joints, fatigue and the ten years she lost believing she was making it up. The joke is old because the evidence has been gathering for a decade and the system has been slow to catch up.
This time the evidence has a new number attached. Of the 1,754 people Crompton and colleagues surveyed, autistic participants had more symptoms, worse outcomes, and different pain points than everyone else in the room. Australian healthcare can keep treating AuDHD as a tidy category of brain, separate from the bodies those brains are tethered to. Or it can take the hint the research keeps offering: your body isn’t making it up, and the diagnosis that finally makes sense is usually more than one.
Sources
- Crompton C et al. (2026). Health experiences and outcomes of autistic and non-autistic adults with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and hypermobility spectrum disorder. BMC Medicine. link.springer.com
- Csecs JLL et al. (2022). Joint Hypermobility Links Neurodivergence to Dysautonomia and Pain. Frontiers in Psychiatry. frontiersin.org
- Ehlers-Danlos Australia. ehlersdanlosaus.com
- Connective Tissue Disorders Network Australia. ctdna.org.au
- Reframing Autism — The Link Between Hypermobility and Autism. reframingautism.org.au
- Trudgian R & Flood T (2024). An exploration of the journey to diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) for women living in Australia. PLOS ONE. journals.plos.org
- AusDoc — A GP guide to hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. ausdoc.com.au
- Wasim S et al. Prevalence of ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder in Children with HSD or hEDS. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Leave a Reply