ADHD Treatment-Gap Index: Country Benchmarking for Market Access
A subscription data product that scores each country on the gap between its actual ADHD medication consumption and what its ADHD prevalence would imply, telling pharma market-access teams and health ministries where treatment is absent and whether the barrier is drug supply or diagnosis capacity.
Concept
A subscription analytics product that scores every country on the gap between its actual ADHD medication consumption (defined daily doses per 1,000 children/adolescents per day) and the consumption its epidemiological prevalence would imply — then decomposes the gap so users know what to do about it. Where consumption is near zero, the binding constraint is diagnosis capacity, not drug supply, so the index flags markets where drug registration alone will not move uptake and diagnostic-capacity or medical-education partnerships must come first. It also tracks drug-class momentum (guanfacine, amphetamines, methylphenidate) country by country, so market-access teams see where demand is shifting class by class. Users: pharma market-access and global-access teams deciding where to register, launch, and build capacity programs; health ministries and global-health agencies deciding where to invest in diagnostic services.
Why now
Paper [0] used IQVIA-MIDAS sales data across 64 countries (2015–2019) and found consumption grew +9.72% per year overall (1.19 → 1.43 DDD/TID) — but the increase was confined to high-income countries (+11.28%/yr). In 2019, pooled consumption was 6.39 DDD/TID in high-income countries versus 0.37 in upper-middle-income and 0.02 in lower-middle-income countries — orders of magnitude below the roughly 5% child/adolescent prevalence documented in older corpus meta-analyses [9], whose methodological variability [7] is precisely why the index needs standardized prevalence assumptions built in. North America already had the highest regional rate in 2019 (111.93 DDD/TID) with US growth slowing to +0.61% per year, so the growth story has moved to under-served markets; guanfacine (+79.77%/yr) and amphetamines (+30.32%/yr) are the fastest-growing classes to track.
Written by GLM · 14 Oct 2026
AI assessment
A high-value B2B data product that transforms epidemiological gaps into a strategic roadmap for pharmaceutical market expansion and global health resource allocation.
- Evidence strength 5/5
- The idea directly synthesizes the consumption data from Paper [3] with the prevalence meta-analyses in Papers [1] and [2], using the specific DDD/TID metrics and income-level disparities documented in the full texts.
- Market pull 4/5
- Pharma market-access teams have high willingness to pay for data that justifies the cost of registering drugs in new territories or investing in medical education to create demand.
- Novelty & moat 4/5
- While other catalog ideas focus on clinical or regional gaps (GP practices, Medicaid), this is the first to apply the 'treatment gap' logic at a sovereign/national level for commercial market-entry strategy.
- Feasibility 3/5
- The core logic is simple, but the MVP depends on securing ongoing access to high-cost proprietary data like IQVIA-MIDAS or similar pharmaceutical sales databases.
- Wedge clarity 5/5
- The wedge is a sharp, specific index that tells a pharma company exactly why a market is underperforming (diagnosis capacity vs. supply), providing immediate actionable intelligence.
- Simplicity / focus 5/5
- The product is a focused subscription data index with a single clear value proposition, avoiding the 'platform' trap.
Scored by Gemma 4 · 14 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.
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Who benefits
Markets Vyvanse/Elvanse and Intuniv (guanfacine, the fastest-growing class at +79.77%/yr); the index tells it which middle-income markets to pursue and where diagnosis capacity must be built before launch can succeed.
- IQVIAcompany
Already owns the MIDAS pharmaceutical sales data underlying the consumption figures; a derived treatment-gap index is a natural value-added subscription on data it already collects.
- Janssen Pharmaceuticalscompany
Markets Concerta (methylphenidate); with US growth slowing to +0.61%/yr, it needs country-level gap evidence to prioritize emerging-market access programs.
- World Health Organizationorganization
Its mental health service-development work can use the index to target ADHD diagnosis and treatment capacity where consumption sits at 0.02–0.37 DDD/TID, far below epidemiological need.
- Brazilian Ministry of Healthorganization
An upper-middle-income country in the 0.37 DDD/TID consumption tier; the index quantifies its diagnosis and treatment barrier against expected prevalence for national service planning.
Research it builds on
- The global prevalence of ADHD in children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysisNader Salari, Hooman Ghasemi, Nasrin Abdoli et al. · 2023 · 663 citationsAll ideas from this paper →
- Prevalence of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): systematic review and meta-analysisSara Popit, Klara Serod, Igor Locatelli et al. · 2024 · 95 citationsAll ideas from this paper →
- Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder medication consumption in 64 countries and regions from 2015 to 2019: a longitudinal studyAdrienne Y L Chan, Tiantian Ma, Wallis C. Y. Lau et al. · 2023 · 92 citationsAll ideas from this paper →