> They found that youth with ADHD had heightened connectivity between structures deep in the brain involved in learning, movement, reward, and emotion (caudate, putamen, and nucleus accumbens seeds) and structures in the frontal area of the brain involved in attention and control of unwanted behaviors (superior temporal gyri, insula, inferior parietal lobe, and inferior frontal gyri).
So... ADHD is a symptom of an overly integrated brain.
Not going to lie - I've always been kind of fond of my mild ADHD. There's something enjoyable about being interested in everything going on around you (or in your head). It just happens to be a liability in schools or jobs where you're only supposed to be doing "just this one thing".
This tracks with my own theory on ADHD. It often times feels like a super power when it isn't ruining your life. If you manage it, it's remarkable. Left to its own devices, it's debilitating. When I was younger I tried to medicate the issue away, and then eventually came to the realization that I was doing more harm than good. So I learned to appreciate myself as just "different" as opposed to "dysfunctional".
Perhaps there's some evolutionary advantage to these 'mental disorders' that'll make sense when they're more fully formed in another few hundred years.
Seems like if you go back in time, someone who is impulsive + easily bored etc would be an evolutionary advantage to their tribe (what's over that hill? let's go see!) if not themselves.
All quirky fun and games until you realize you can't do high-paying jobs that requires consistent focus. Which is not really a problem unless you want a family or to live in nice parts of cities.
>All quirky fun and games until you realize you can't do high-paying jobs that requires consistent focus.
This is not a good understanding of ADHD. People with ADHD have hyperfocus tendencies, and this in fact can apply to their job while they ignore everything else.
That is to say extremely successful people might be that way BECAUSE of their ADHD, not in spite of it. A programmer who devotes the majority of their life to learning their craft, or an artist who spends all their attention on their next (or first) hit album.
But it's an even worse understanding of what high-paying jobs actually require.
There's a lot of high-paying tech jobs that can be playing into ADHD (and other not neuro typical brains) strengths and focus thats more like running 42 1km "sprints" than mostly consistent pace 42km marathon.
Things that come to mind are data science/analysis, debugging and fixing outages (finalizing follow up RFO might be hardest part ), security/hacking (hopefully white hat)...
And basically whatever else one personally finds interesting to dig into deep and/or wide.
I've always been a cautious skeptic of ADHD in children. On the one hand I know ADHD is a thing and that it legitimately affects some children, but on the other hand I realize that alot of ADHD symptoms overlap with the general nature of children, especially boys.
My wonder is when does it to go from a kid just being a kid to a child actually affected by ADHD. Often times it's described as just not being able to pay attention but in my personal experience I remember finding it hard to focus as a child.
The drugs also scare me. I remember taking Adderall in college to help study for tests and crunch on projects but I distinctly remember anytime I took one I always wondered how people could take it every day, Adderall (and Vyvance) were amazing drugs for helping to stay focused, but wow did they f** me up, I remember it always felt great at first and by the end of the study session I couldn't imagine how people could take it every day because of the side effects (especially the lack of hunger). Adults taking the drug is one thing but the idea of giving something like that to a child profoundly scares me.
There is a huge difference between the common stereotype of ADHD (just rowdy children who can't sit still), and actual symptoms and diagnostic criteria. The difference is almost as comically warped as an image of a "hacker" in media vs actual hackers.
ADHD includes many other things like weak short-term memory, defunct perception of time, hard to control hyperfocus, overwhelming inner monologue, and executive dysfunction that makes some tasks physically impossible to start even when the person wants to do them. And it comes with a bunch of other comorbidities. Doctors diagnosing ADHD also have obligation to exclude other causes of the symptoms, like bipolar.
The stimulant medication does not actually cause stimulation in people with ADHD. When people have a deficit/insensitivity to the neurotransmitters, the meds merely bring them up from a dysfunctional level where the brain lacked ability to function properly to the normal-ish level.
I really like that you list a whole lot of things that ADHD includes that most people are unaware of, but I wanted to call attention to the two that probably had the largest negative impact on my own life
Rejection Sensitivity and Emotional Disregulation
I have always been paralyzed by being afraid of failure (rejection), and that has kept me from pursuing a lot of things in the past
And I've always been prone to anger outbursts, even over seemingly trivial silly things. It has damaged so many of my relationships and overall left me pretty lonely throughout my life. And when the dust settles I'm sitting there thinking "Why was I so angry about that thing. I don't even care that much about it"
My ADHD diagnosis and medication, starting in my early 30s, has almost entirely turned my life around
I guarantee that you took Adderall IR, and a higher dose than those typically prescribed by a doctor. It’s like slamming back 10 cups of espresso instead of sipping one over a day. And then judging people who drink a coffee a day.
Slow release and a therapeutic dose is significantly different than slamming back meds in school like that. Therapeutic dose means you can’t even tell you took the med, until you either stop or look back at the day and record how much you were able to achieve.
Yes, some doctors are bad and calculate a dosage based on weight or other arbitrary means. Good doctors and psychiatrists start you on the lowest dose and slowly titrate you up based on DSM guidelines.
Lastly, medication for ADHD is something that makes all the actual effective treatments do-able. It’s a first step not a crux.
> Lastly, medication for ADHD is something that makes all the actual effective treatments do-able. It’s a first step not a crux.
This is a nuance that is lost on a lot of people. Medication needs to be taken in conjunction with re-learning how to study/organize/prioritize. This actually allows for new neuro-pathways to be forged and reinforced in the brain, which actually fixes many of the negative effects of ADHD, lessening the need for medication over time for many people. This effect is easy to observe in children because their brains are still extremely very plastic, but it also causes people to question why we need to prescribe medication if kids just end up “growing out of it”.
Hmm, I’ve become less and less sceptical over time simply because I’ve seen the research on how medicating those with ADHD drops all cause mortality enough to extend lifespan by several years. It’s possible there’s overdiagnosis even still but I think people overestimate the potential scale of it, 25% overdiagnosis seems plausible to me but people act like ADHD is just all made up and a way to drug children into being study zombies because they act too much like typical children. It’s profound how often people diagnosed with ADHD, when off medication, will just kill themselves accidentally in car accidents and drug overdoses far more than the general population.
ADHD is not just labelling children with being disordered for being children. It’s labelling like the most inattentive, dysregulated, and hyperactive 5% or so of children. Children that act like 5 year olds when their peers act like 7 year olds. ADHD has been observed for centuries as well. ADHD in women tends to be diagnosed later in life and if you study certain subpopulations of women like teen mothers you will trip over ADHD and the diagnostic gap narrows with age.
There’s also evidence like.. from the OP where we can observe neurological differences. I think my main problem with ADHD is labelling something that’s probably evolutionarily adaptive (People with ADHD love having unprotected sex early in life) as a disorder and deficit, but this gets into the philosophy of medicine.
Dr. Russell Barkley is a good source of information and champion of the scientific mainstream view of ADHD.
> The drugs also scare me... The idea of giving something like that to a child profoundly scares me.
It works differently in people with the disorder. I took Adderall as a child and as an adult for adhd. It didn't get me wired nor did I have withdrawal symptoms, I simply felt more centered and capable of starting tasks. I know that we can only draw on our own experiences to judge things, but understand that people with this disorder experience the drug completely differently than you did.
This was pretty much my experience as well. I didn’t feel high or up when taking adderall. It was almost unnoticed while on it, but reflecting back on what I was able to accomplish during the day it clearly had an impact. After taking it for close to a year, I just stopped cold turkey and had zero issues with any withdrawal symptoms.
My brother has been known to take adderall recreationally. Apparently he would crush it up and snort it. He definitely gets a high from it. I’m not sure how much the difference in our experience is due to the delivery method versus differences in how our bodies processed it.
I take stimulants for idiopathic hypersomnia and ironically they give me ADHD like symptoms. It’s much harder to concentrate on a single task when I’m on them.
No need to be skeptical of children that are diagnosed. It is often (and I am speaking solely about boys, just as you do) quite obvious if you are trained in recognising those markers. This doesn't mean all are found and the current training is severely lacking in recognising symptoms for girls.
Regardless, yes it is often described by others and those who are not diagnosed with ADHD as " just not being able to focus". This simplification misses out on a whole scala of symptoms and experiences.
As for the medication, it is true that it is sometimes mis/abused by some students. One thing to realize is that for those who have ADHD drugs and the stuff may have completely different effects on the person. Uppers making some people sleepy for example.
Lastly children are often not given those drugs you mention but alternative without those side effects.
This is where it gets weird for me. I certainly can learn but school was torture. I had no problems socializing. I'm signed up for a neurological exam. I have had a personality exam with nothing jumping out.
The problem is that what is perceived as "disordered" is different across time and space.
Behavior patterns that were once totally normal may get in the way of living the kind of life that some parents have come to expect of their kids—running from school to dance to piano to soccer to tutors to therapy to whatever. Are these kids disordered because they can't keep up, or are the demands unreasonable?
I have to say the first time I took I suddenly felt very calm.
Noises from neighboring apartments, dogs barking, children outside playing ceased to be annoying distractions.
I took 5mg to be precautious. And spent hours doing an overdue cleaning my room / apartment. And i felt ok doing it when normally i'd feel irritated. Normally i'd have trouble deciding where to start this, but with this i just started.
I started properly paying bills. To be clear i had the money to pay these bills. But i would always tend to leave them until I was getting notices to remind me.
Vyvanse was interesting though. It made me a lot more assertive, when most people would describe me as the opposite. I liked that but it was double edged sword. I stopped because I was working as sales assistant in a shop and I found I was getting just a bit too angry at belligerent customers.
We’ve been prescribing amphetamine salts since the 1950s, and Adderall specifically since the 1990s. It’s extremely well studied at this point.
Obviously we don’t give kids the doses college students might take for cramming. Stimulant sensitivity varies quite widely in the population—a dosage that might be appropriate for a particular child may make an adult feel “wired.” But there’s a lot of science showing that Adderall in appropriate doses is neither habit forming nor do people develop a resistance to it (which is what typically causes escalating usage).
> My wonder is when does it to go from a kid just being a kid to a child actually affected by ADHD
That's the multi-billion dollar question. From grades K-3, my son got straight A's and was a typical "boy" in the classroom. Occasionally not the best at paying attention, but no big deal.
Fourth grade was another story. He'd come home exhausted, and cry himself into a nap nearly every day. Not coincidentally, that's what the academics shifted from pure memory, associative reasoning, and recall to tasks that also required planning and executive function. That, plus the expectations of better ability to sit still and pay attention were just too much.
We eventually paid the big $$$ for a full, two-day neuro-psych evaluation. It was eye-opening for both my wife and I. For me, it showed how differently my son's brain was working, and for my wife it shined a light on her undiagnosed ADHD.
We did resist giving our son medication, and waited until he decided that he wanted to try it (16 years). It made an amazing difference in his ability to study and stay on task, but it did come with the weight loss and a serious 4-6pm crash every day, though those effects seemed to mitigate over time.
>We did resist giving our son medication, and waited until he decided that he wanted to try it (16 years)
I sincerely think this is a good thing to do and gives people a healthier relationship to mental health than being coerced into taking drugs with harsh side-effects.
The problem is that often a child with ADHD may also have autism, or various other difficulties (learning disabilities, anxiety disoder) that may mask, or have similar symptoms. And then you can also have such disorders without having ADHD. The same structural differences in brain can cause lots of things.
Absolutely. Take my two kids, they are wildly different,and so equal. One can focus a bit the other is impossible to get focused. He gets distracted when doing a wee, is astonishing, sometimes I'm speechless.
Even if true, the problem is those who don't but think they do.
I suspect you might also have parents who kinda like the idea that there child's behaviour can be explained by ADHD. My sister's kid often gets in trouble at school for example, and whenever this happens she will try to excuse it by saying she has ADHD. I'm not at all convinced given that imo it's far easier to explain the misbehaviour with bad parenting.
Iirc adhd is a neurodevelopmental condition. So if a 5 year old has similar executive function as the average 5yo he’s probably fine. But if a 10 yo has a 7yo’s levels it’s worth looking at. And if this same person has this even later to the point where it affects life in multiple situations it’s a disorder, medically speaking. Also, some people (not all) grow out of adhd in their adulthood as the brain develops.
Many of the people who grew out of it did it not naturally but because they were on medication. Medication during childhood has been well proven in longitudinal studies to reduce the incidence of adult ADHD.
Are you also skeptical of obesity in teens because eating a lot is just the general nature of teens, especially boys? Are you appalled that diabetics take insulin every day because you once injected yourself with insulin you didn't need and experienced severe side effects?
Diabetes is a biological disease which can be objectively proven and diagnosed based on biological tests.
There are no objective biological diagnostic criteria for anything in the DSM.
"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances, The New Crisis of Confidence in Psychiatric Diagnosis
These comparisons feel like bad faith. This is what they actually said:
> I've always been a cautious skeptic of ADHD in children. On the one hand I know ADHD is a thing and that it legitimately affects some children ...
They explicitly say that they know it affects some children, but they're concerned that it's overdiagnosed because the symptoms have overlap with normal child development. This isn't some kind of uninformed conspiracy theory, it's a legitimate concern shared by experts in the field [0].
My fear isn't that experts get confused and mix up real ADHD with normal childhood, my fear is that parents expect too much of their kids and convince their family doctor (who isn't an expert) to diagnose the child and prescribe Adderall. That fear is totally compatible with ADHD also being a real thing that actually needs treatment in other children.
This is a no-op paper. They found nothing useful. Maybe an inkling of something extremely weak. Maybe. Certainly nothing that should be popularized, taken up by the media, or used to make any decisions about anything.
The kicker is:
> Effect sizes were small (largest peak d, 0.15).
To put that into language more people here would understand, it's like publishing a paper where your classifier gets 52% accuracy on a binary task (this is the zeroth order equivalent of a Cohen's d of 0.15), but you run it over so many ADHD patients that your confidence interval for that 52% accuracy is very small. Most people would still ignore it because it's likely still noise from other small confounds.
That is a paper that you should not put your name on. I certainly would not. Their effects are also more like 0.11 not 0.15; the largest peak misrepresents all of the rest of the results.
What they did is aggregate so much data that even a small inconsequential difference between groups that may account for nothing at all, that would go away with slightly different controls for confounds, becomes statistically significant.
A lot of the comments here drawing conclusions like, ADHD is about an overly integrated brain or whatever are really frightening. This means nothing. Science communication at its worst.
>That is a paper that you should not put your name on. I certainly would not. Their effects are also more like 0.11 not 0.15; the largest peak misrepresents all of the rest of the results.
>What they did is aggregate so much data that even a small inconsequential difference between groups that may account for nothing at all, that would go away with slightly different controls for confounds, becomes statistically significant.
>A lot of the comments here drawing conclusions like, ADHD is about an overly integrated brain or whatever are really frightening. This means nothing. Science communication at its worst.
Here are the paper's authors' affiliations:
Office of the Clinical Director, NIMH, Bethesda, Md. (Norman, Shaw); Section on Neurobehavioral and Clinical Research, Social and Behavioral Research Branch, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Md. (Sudre, Price, Shaw).
It's hard for me to believe that the authors should not have put their name on this paper.
Do you have a background and credentials as valid?
"No operation"; in machine language it's an instruction that doesn't do anything, in broader tech lingo it's something that's moot or which requires no work. Commenter is basically saying that nothing actionable can be concluded from the paper's findings.
No-op is computer jargon for "no operation". It comes from CPUs having instructions (or commands) that do effectively nothing. Programming languages sometimes use the no-op term for functions (or procedures) that are placeholders that do nothing. These placeholder functions can be replaced later and perform some action. TL;DR: A "no-op" is something that does nothing, or as used by the parent, a paper that doesn't contribute anything.
It also doesn't look like they considered what effect a daily prescription of ADHD medications might have on brain connections versus the inherent condition itself.
Readit News
So... ADHD is a symptom of an overly integrated brain.
Not going to lie - I've always been kind of fond of my mild ADHD. There's something enjoyable about being interested in everything going on around you (or in your head). It just happens to be a liability in schools or jobs where you're only supposed to be doing "just this one thing".
Perhaps there's some evolutionary advantage to these 'mental disorders' that'll make sense when they're more fully formed in another few hundred years.
This is not a good understanding of ADHD. People with ADHD have hyperfocus tendencies, and this in fact can apply to their job while they ignore everything else.
That is to say extremely successful people might be that way BECAUSE of their ADHD, not in spite of it. A programmer who devotes the majority of their life to learning their craft, or an artist who spends all their attention on their next (or first) hit album.
But it's an even worse understanding of what high-paying jobs actually require.
Things that come to mind are data science/analysis, debugging and fixing outages (finalizing follow up RFO might be hardest part ), security/hacking (hopefully white hat)...
And basically whatever else one personally finds interesting to dig into deep and/or wide.
My wonder is when does it to go from a kid just being a kid to a child actually affected by ADHD. Often times it's described as just not being able to pay attention but in my personal experience I remember finding it hard to focus as a child.
The drugs also scare me. I remember taking Adderall in college to help study for tests and crunch on projects but I distinctly remember anytime I took one I always wondered how people could take it every day, Adderall (and Vyvance) were amazing drugs for helping to stay focused, but wow did they f** me up, I remember it always felt great at first and by the end of the study session I couldn't imagine how people could take it every day because of the side effects (especially the lack of hunger). Adults taking the drug is one thing but the idea of giving something like that to a child profoundly scares me.
ADHD includes many other things like weak short-term memory, defunct perception of time, hard to control hyperfocus, overwhelming inner monologue, and executive dysfunction that makes some tasks physically impossible to start even when the person wants to do them. And it comes with a bunch of other comorbidities. Doctors diagnosing ADHD also have obligation to exclude other causes of the symptoms, like bipolar.
The stimulant medication does not actually cause stimulation in people with ADHD. When people have a deficit/insensitivity to the neurotransmitters, the meds merely bring them up from a dysfunctional level where the brain lacked ability to function properly to the normal-ish level.
Rejection Sensitivity and Emotional Disregulation
I have always been paralyzed by being afraid of failure (rejection), and that has kept me from pursuing a lot of things in the past
And I've always been prone to anger outbursts, even over seemingly trivial silly things. It has damaged so many of my relationships and overall left me pretty lonely throughout my life. And when the dust settles I'm sitting there thinking "Why was I so angry about that thing. I don't even care that much about it"
My ADHD diagnosis and medication, starting in my early 30s, has almost entirely turned my life around
Slow release and a therapeutic dose is significantly different than slamming back meds in school like that. Therapeutic dose means you can’t even tell you took the med, until you either stop or look back at the day and record how much you were able to achieve.
Yes, some doctors are bad and calculate a dosage based on weight or other arbitrary means. Good doctors and psychiatrists start you on the lowest dose and slowly titrate you up based on DSM guidelines.
Lastly, medication for ADHD is something that makes all the actual effective treatments do-able. It’s a first step not a crux.
This is a nuance that is lost on a lot of people. Medication needs to be taken in conjunction with re-learning how to study/organize/prioritize. This actually allows for new neuro-pathways to be forged and reinforced in the brain, which actually fixes many of the negative effects of ADHD, lessening the need for medication over time for many people. This effect is easy to observe in children because their brains are still extremely very plastic, but it also causes people to question why we need to prescribe medication if kids just end up “growing out of it”.
ADHD is not just labelling children with being disordered for being children. It’s labelling like the most inattentive, dysregulated, and hyperactive 5% or so of children. Children that act like 5 year olds when their peers act like 7 year olds. ADHD has been observed for centuries as well. ADHD in women tends to be diagnosed later in life and if you study certain subpopulations of women like teen mothers you will trip over ADHD and the diagnostic gap narrows with age.
There’s also evidence like.. from the OP where we can observe neurological differences. I think my main problem with ADHD is labelling something that’s probably evolutionarily adaptive (People with ADHD love having unprotected sex early in life) as a disorder and deficit, but this gets into the philosophy of medicine.
Dr. Russell Barkley is a good source of information and champion of the scientific mainstream view of ADHD.
It works differently in people with the disorder. I took Adderall as a child and as an adult for adhd. It didn't get me wired nor did I have withdrawal symptoms, I simply felt more centered and capable of starting tasks. I know that we can only draw on our own experiences to judge things, but understand that people with this disorder experience the drug completely differently than you did.
My brother has been known to take adderall recreationally. Apparently he would crush it up and snort it. He definitely gets a high from it. I’m not sure how much the difference in our experience is due to the delivery method versus differences in how our bodies processed it.
Regardless, yes it is often described by others and those who are not diagnosed with ADHD as " just not being able to focus". This simplification misses out on a whole scala of symptoms and experiences.
As for the medication, it is true that it is sometimes mis/abused by some students. One thing to realize is that for those who have ADHD drugs and the stuff may have completely different effects on the person. Uppers making some people sleepy for example. Lastly children are often not given those drugs you mention but alternative without those side effects.
The second D - disorder. When it affects the kid's ability to learn, socialise, etc
Behavior patterns that were once totally normal may get in the way of living the kind of life that some parents have come to expect of their kids—running from school to dance to piano to soccer to tutors to therapy to whatever. Are these kids disordered because they can't keep up, or are the demands unreasonable?
I have to say the first time I took I suddenly felt very calm. Noises from neighboring apartments, dogs barking, children outside playing ceased to be annoying distractions.
I took 5mg to be precautious. And spent hours doing an overdue cleaning my room / apartment. And i felt ok doing it when normally i'd feel irritated. Normally i'd have trouble deciding where to start this, but with this i just started.
I started properly paying bills. To be clear i had the money to pay these bills. But i would always tend to leave them until I was getting notices to remind me.
Vyvanse was interesting though. It made me a lot more assertive, when most people would describe me as the opposite. I liked that but it was double edged sword. I stopped because I was working as sales assistant in a shop and I found I was getting just a bit too angry at belligerent customers.
Obviously we don’t give kids the doses college students might take for cramming. Stimulant sensitivity varies quite widely in the population—a dosage that might be appropriate for a particular child may make an adult feel “wired.” But there’s a lot of science showing that Adderall in appropriate doses is neither habit forming nor do people develop a resistance to it (which is what typically causes escalating usage).
That's the multi-billion dollar question. From grades K-3, my son got straight A's and was a typical "boy" in the classroom. Occasionally not the best at paying attention, but no big deal.
Fourth grade was another story. He'd come home exhausted, and cry himself into a nap nearly every day. Not coincidentally, that's what the academics shifted from pure memory, associative reasoning, and recall to tasks that also required planning and executive function. That, plus the expectations of better ability to sit still and pay attention were just too much.
We eventually paid the big $$$ for a full, two-day neuro-psych evaluation. It was eye-opening for both my wife and I. For me, it showed how differently my son's brain was working, and for my wife it shined a light on her undiagnosed ADHD.
We did resist giving our son medication, and waited until he decided that he wanted to try it (16 years). It made an amazing difference in his ability to study and stay on task, but it did come with the weight loss and a serious 4-6pm crash every day, though those effects seemed to mitigate over time.
I sincerely think this is a good thing to do and gives people a healthier relationship to mental health than being coerced into taking drugs with harsh side-effects.
I suspect you might also have parents who kinda like the idea that there child's behaviour can be explained by ADHD. My sister's kid often gets in trouble at school for example, and whenever this happens she will try to excuse it by saying she has ADHD. I'm not at all convinced given that imo it's far easier to explain the misbehaviour with bad parenting.
Deleted Comment
There are no objective biological diagnostic criteria for anything in the DSM.
"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances, The New Crisis of Confidence in Psychiatric Diagnosis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances
> I've always been a cautious skeptic of ADHD in children. On the one hand I know ADHD is a thing and that it legitimately affects some children ...
They explicitly say that they know it affects some children, but they're concerned that it's overdiagnosed because the symptoms have overlap with normal child development. This isn't some kind of uninformed conspiracy theory, it's a legitimate concern shared by experts in the field [0].
My fear isn't that experts get confused and mix up real ADHD with normal childhood, my fear is that parents expect too much of their kids and convince their family doctor (who isn't an expert) to diagnose the child and prescribe Adderall. That fear is totally compatible with ADHD also being a real thing that actually needs treatment in other children.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042533/
The kicker is:
> Effect sizes were small (largest peak d, 0.15).
To put that into language more people here would understand, it's like publishing a paper where your classifier gets 52% accuracy on a binary task (this is the zeroth order equivalent of a Cohen's d of 0.15), but you run it over so many ADHD patients that your confidence interval for that 52% accuracy is very small. Most people would still ignore it because it's likely still noise from other small confounds.
That is a paper that you should not put your name on. I certainly would not. Their effects are also more like 0.11 not 0.15; the largest peak misrepresents all of the rest of the results.
What they did is aggregate so much data that even a small inconsequential difference between groups that may account for nothing at all, that would go away with slightly different controls for confounds, becomes statistically significant.
A lot of the comments here drawing conclusions like, ADHD is about an overly integrated brain or whatever are really frightening. This means nothing. Science communication at its worst.
ChatGPT gave me a more balanced view to understand OP's criticisms. Sharing if anyone would like to read a more dispassionate (machine) version.
>What they did is aggregate so much data that even a small inconsequential difference between groups that may account for nothing at all, that would go away with slightly different controls for confounds, becomes statistically significant.
>A lot of the comments here drawing conclusions like, ADHD is about an overly integrated brain or whatever are really frightening. This means nothing. Science communication at its worst.
Here are the paper's authors' affiliations:
Office of the Clinical Director, NIMH, Bethesda, Md. (Norman, Shaw); Section on Neurobehavioral and Clinical Research, Social and Behavioral Research Branch, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Md. (Sudre, Price, Shaw).
It's hard for me to believe that the authors should not have put their name on this paper.
Do you have a background and credentials as valid?
> Effect sizes were small (largest peak d, 0.15).
It also doesn't look like they considered what effect a daily prescription of ADHD medications might have on brain connections versus the inherent condition itself.