Treatment for the disease itself is nonexistent, but there are options for most of the symptoms. For example, one suffering from hearing loss would be given hearing aids, and those with Hirschsprung’s disorder can be treated with a colostomy.

If the Hirschsprung's disease is treated in time, ABCD sufferers live otherwise healthy lives. If it is not found soon enough, death often occurs in infancy. For those suffering hearing loss, it is generally regressive and the damage to hearing increases over time. Digestive problems from the colostomy and reattachment may exist, but most cases can be treated with laxatives. The only other debilitating symptom is hearing loss, which is usually degenerative and can only be treated with surgery or hearing aids.

Some researchers have suggested that DES is mislabelled as a syndrome because it is possible for the symptoms to exist on their own. Also, there is not a distinct pattern of damage that leads to the syndrome. Not all patients with frontal lobe damage have DES and some patients with no damage at all to the frontal lobe exhibit the necessary pattern of symptoms. This has led research to investigate the possibility that executive functioning is broken down into multiple processes that are spread throughout the frontal lobe. Further disagreement comes from the syndrome being based on Baddeley and Hitch's model of working memory and the central executive, which is a hypothetical construct.

The vagueness of some aspects of the syndrome has led researchers to test for it in a non-clinical sample. The results show that some dysexecutive behaviours are part of everyday life, and the symptoms exist to varying degrees in everyone. For example, absent-mindedness and lapses in attention are common everyday occurrences for most people. However, for the majority of the population such inattentiveness is manageable, whereas patients with DES experience it to such a degree that daily tasks become difficult.

Dysexecutive syndrome (DES) consists of a group of symptoms, usually resulting from brain damage, that fall into cognitive, behavioural and emotional categories and tend to occur together. The term was introduced by Alan Baddeley to describe a common pattern of dysfunction in executive functions, such as planning, abstract thinking, flexibility and behavioural control. It is thought to be Baddeley's hypothesized working memory system and the central executive that are the hypothetical systems impaired in DES. The syndrome was once known as frontal lobe syndrome, however dysexecutive syndrome is preferred because it emphasizes the functional pattern of deficits (the symptoms) over the location of the syndrome in the frontal lobe, which is often not the only area affected.

Classification code in ICD-10 - F07