Your Results
Understanding Your AuDHD Screening Results
Your results show three independent scores, up to 14 subscale breakdowns, confidence levels, and a pattern analysis. This guide explains what each element means and how to use it.
Answer-first summary
Quick answer
Read the three main axes first, then the subscales. The results are most useful as a pattern map for self-understanding and clinical discussion, not as a standalone diagnosis.
The three axis scores
Every result starts with three numbers: your ADHD score, your Autism (ASD) score, and your AuDHD score. Each is calculated independently — they are not averages of each other, and a high score on one does not automatically imply anything about the others.
This is the core design decision that makes iamaudhd different from tools that produce a single number or a combined “neurodivergent score.” The relationship between these three scores is where the most important information lives.
ADHD axis
Reflects inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and executive function patterns aggregated across all three life stages.
ASD axis
Reflects social communication differences, restricted/repetitive patterns, sensory processing, and camouflaging aggregated across all three life stages.
AuDHD axis
Reflects the six co-occurrence interaction domains — patterns that only emerge when ADHD and autism are both present and interacting.
What the score levels mean
Scores are displayed with color indicators calibrated to clinical research thresholds. The color palette is intentional — there are no red flags here, only information.
Sage — Low (below 35%)
Trait patterns in this range are not consistent with ADHD, autism, or AuDHD at a level that warrants clinical attention. Note that low individual axis scores combined with an elevated AuDHD score may indicate mutual masking.
Amber — Moderate (35–65%)
Trait patterns in this range suggest meaningful presence of the relevant traits. Moderate scores across multiple axes often carry more clinical significance than a single elevated score.
Terracotta — Elevated (above 65%)
Trait patterns in this range are consistent with clinically significant presence of the condition being screened for. An elevated score warrants professional evaluation. It is not a diagnosis — but it is a meaningful signal.
Confidence levels and “insufficient data”
Every axis score is accompanied by a confidence level, which reflects how many of the relevant questions you answered. A score based on 95% of questions carries more statistical weight than one based on 65%.
If fewer than 60% of questions in an axis are answered, the scoring engine does not report a score at all. Instead, you will see “insufficient data.” This is not a negative result — it is the system being honest about its limits. Reporting a score with low data coverage would be misleading, so it doesn't.
| Questions answered | Confidence |
|---|---|
| 90–100% | High |
| 75–89% | Moderate |
| 60–74% | Low |
| Below 60% | Insufficient |
If you see “insufficient data,” consider retaking the relevant life stage and revisiting questions you skipped. The preparation guide has tips on when skipping is appropriate versus when it's avoidance.
The 14 subscales
Available in the full report. Each subscale gives you a granular view of where within an axis your traits are concentrated.
ADHD — 4 subscales
Inattention
Focus, distractibility, task completion, and losing track of things. Elevated scores here reflect the classic ADHD attention pattern — not a character flaw, but a consistent difference in how your attention system allocates and maintains focus.
Hyperactivity–Impulsivity
Restlessness, fidgeting, interrupting, and acting before thinking. Note that hyperactivity in adults often presents as internal restlessness rather than visible physical movement.
Emotional Dysregulation
Mood volatility, rejection sensitivity, and frustration tolerance. This subscale captures a core ADHD feature that older diagnostic criteria underemphasized but that significantly affects daily functioning.
Executive Function
Planning, time management, task initiation, and organization. This is often where the gap between intelligence and performance is most visible in ADHD.
Autism (ASD) — 4 subscales
Social Communication
Reading social cues, reciprocal conversation, nonverbal communication, and navigating unwritten social rules. This subscale reflects the cognitive and processing differences in social interaction, not social motivation.
Restricted/Repetitive Patterns
Routines, rituals, resistance to change, and repetitive behaviors or interests. These patterns often serve important regulatory functions — disrupting them has real costs.
Sensory Processing
Hyper- and hypo-sensitivity across modalities: sound, light, texture, smell, taste, proprioception. Sensory differences are among the most reliably identifiable autism traits.
Camouflaging
The effort of masking autistic traits, scripting social responses, and performing neurotypicality. Elevated camouflaging scores with moderate social communication scores is a classic late-diagnosis pattern.
AuDHD — 6 subscales
These six domains are novel to iamaudhd — designed specifically for AuDHD co-occurrence detection. No single-axis tool captures them, because they are properties of the interaction between conditions, not either condition alone.
Internal Contradiction
The competing needs that are specific to AuDHD — craving both routine and novelty, connection and solitude, structure and spontaneity, sometimes simultaneously.
Dual-Layer Masking
Suppressing ADHD traits and autistic traits simultaneously, compounding the exhaustion of masking. This subscale is novel to iamaudhd — no single-axis tool captures it.
Interest Architecture
Stable autistic special interests coexisting with cycling ADHD hyperfixations. Both patterns are present, producing a distinctive relationship with engagement and depth.
Task Inertia–Paralysis
The compound stuck state: ADHD task initiation failure meets autistic task inertia. Can't start, and when started, can't stop. This AuDHD-specific pattern is frequently misread as laziness or procrastination.
Sensory Seeker–Avoider
Seeking and avoiding stimulation — sometimes in the same modality, sometimes at the same time. A pattern that confuses standard sensory profiles designed for autism alone.
Burnout & Recovery
AuDHD burnout is distinct from both autistic burnout and ADHD overwhelm — and from ordinary exhaustion. Standard rest does not fix it, because the recovery needs of each condition conflict.
Mutual masking in your results
One of the more counterintuitive findings the pattern analysis can surface: a high AuDHD score alongside moderate or low ADHD and ASD scores is not a contradiction. It is one of the most important signals the assessment produces.
When ADHD and autism co-occur, each set of traits can suppress the other's presentation. Autistic hyperfocus and routine-building compensate for ADHD inattention. ADHD-driven sociability and spontaneity compensate for autistic social differences. A person living this reality may score “borderline” on both single-axis tools, not because the traits are mild, but because they are hiding each other.
The pattern analysis in the full report flags this specifically. When your AuDHD axis is elevated relative to your individual axes, the report surfaces that as a potential mutual masking pattern and explains what it means for interpreting the overall picture.
This is the pattern most likely to have been missed by any previous screening you may have completed. Single-axis tools are structurally incapable of detecting it — they do not have a third axis to compare against.
The key insight
Do not interpret your ADHD or ASD score in isolation. The relationship between all three scores is the result. An elevated AuDHD axis is meaningful regardless of where your ADHD and ASD axes land individually.
Free results versus the full report
The free results give you the three axis scores and confidence levels immediately after completing the assessment. The scoring engine is identical — you are seeing real results, not a teaser.
The full report ($19.99, one-time payment) adds:
- 14 subscale scores — the granular breakdown of where within each axis your traits are concentrated
- Pattern analysis — a plain-language narrative identifying significant findings, mutual masking flags, and what your score relationships suggest
- PDF export — a formatted document designed for sharing with a clinician, including subscale data and the pattern analysis in a readable clinical format
- Community access — lifetime access to the iamaudhd forum for paid members
The PDF is the single most useful artifact for people seeking a formal clinical evaluation. It translates your results into a format that saves clinician time and gives the conversation a concrete starting point.
What to do with your scores
A result — even a clearly elevated one — is a screening result, not a diagnosis. The appropriate next step depends on what your scores show and what you want from a clinical process.
If your scores are elevated and you want a formal diagnosis, the next step is a referral to a psychiatrist, psychologist, or specialist assessment service with experience in adult ADHD and autism. Bring your PDF report. Frame it as structured screening data rather than a self-diagnosis. Most clinicians will engage with it constructively.
If your scores are elevated but you are not pursuing a formal diagnosis, the results are still useful. They give you validated language for your experience, a structured framework for understanding how your traits relate to each other, and a basis for making decisions about how you structure your life, work, and relationships.
If your scores are low but you still strongly identify with the AuDHD experience, consider retaking with the honest answering principles in mind. Low scores in people who mask heavily can reflect the success of the masking, not the absence of the traits. If you retake and scores remain low, a clinician-administered assessment may capture things self-report cannot.