Patient experience and diagnostic odyssey
How long diagnosis takes, how patients are treated on the way, and the studies that describe both.
A 2021 review of 13 qualitative studies of adults with hEDS or HSD found diagnosis delayed by the symptoms themselves and the lack of a confirmatory test, by patients seeing many providers and receiving many diagnoses, by limited clinician knowledge, and by fragmented health systems. Surveys put numbers on the delay. At one German EDS clinic, the median time to diagnosis was 23.0 years for hEDS or HSD and 14.5 years for classical and classical-like EDS. In an Australian survey of 152 women with EDS, more than half had first noticed symptoms more than 15 years before diagnosis.
A 2025 qualitative study describes the hEDS diagnostic journey as traumatic
findingevidence: probableindependent evidence agreesA qualitative study of people diagnosed with hEDS, published in BMJ Connections Clinical Genetics and Genomics in December 2025, found that experiences with providers ranged from harmful dismissal to validation, and that a diagnosis brought both validation and grief. The authors say physicians who diagnose and treat hEDS should be aware of possible medical post-traumatic stress disorder and past experiences of medical gaslighting. In a separate Global Registry survey of people with hEDS, anxiety and depression were among the most common other diagnoses they had received.
Pain and joint instability lead the symptoms reported at a German EDS clinic
findingevidence: probableA survey of 99 adults diagnosed at the EDS clinic of University Hospital Cologne, 80 of them with hEDS or HSD, was published in 2025. Musculoskeletal pain and joint instability, including repeated subluxations and dislocations, were the most common first symptoms. Pain was the problem respondents most often said severely affected daily activities (60.2%), followed by joint instability (38.8%), other orthopedic problems (36.7%), digestive complaints (35.7%), and fatigue (32.7%). The results come from one specialist clinic.
In a 2025 survey at a German EDS clinic, 32.7% of respondents said fatigue severely affected their daily activities, after pain, joint instability, other orthopedic problems, and digestive complaints. Fatigue is not one of the 2017 hEDS diagnostic criteria.