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posted by on Sunday December 04 2016, @02:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the ants-in-your-pants dept.

This article from MedicalXpress reports on a different way of looking at ADHD:

Hyperactivity seems to be the result of not being able to focus one's attention rather than the other way around. This was proposed in an article in PLOS ONE, written by researchers at Radboud university medical center and Radboud University. It seems to suggest that more attention should be given to the AD than to the HD component.

ADHD is a combination of having difficulties with focusing one's attention (attention deficit, AD) and overly active, impulsive behaviour (hyperactivity disorder, HD). Interestingly enough, many people often struggle with a combination of both characteristics. Very often they are both easily distracted and impulsive, in other words, both AD and HD. "Which leads to the question of whether this involves a correlation, a coincidental combination, or perhaps a causal relation," states computer scientist Tom Heskes.

[...] "This causal relation was also suggested in early psychiatric literature," says psychiatrist Jan Buitelaar, "but as far as we know there was never any hard evidence supporting this claim. It's interesting to see that this mathematical approach enables us to talk with more certainty about a causal relation. And it would be even more interesting, for example, to study whether we can find a more neurological basis for that relation.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:15PM (#436919)

    A thousand years ago people who couldn't cut it in society died. They starved because they didn't have a job, they died from now-curable diseases, etc.

    ...and now they do medical research. Seriously though, the use of "causal" is another one of those hints the paper won't be very useful. Real scientists do not care about causality.

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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Francis on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:27PM

    by Francis (5544) on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:27PM (#436922)

    Real scientists primarily care about causation. A large part of understanding the mechanics of something are understanding the cause and the effects of it.

    If you don't know what causes the effect, your ability to understand it in any sort of deep way is significantly reduced. Knowing that the hyperactivity comes from the lack of control over focus is hugely important in terms of managing the behaviors associated with ADHD. And it probably also helps explain why it is that hyperactivity is frequently absent from adults with ADHD even in cases where that same adult had been hyperactive as a child.

    The summary is off though, it's ADHD whether or not the person is hyperactive.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:43PM (#436925)

      If you don't know what causes the effect, your ability to understand it in any sort of deep way is significantly reduced.

      I don't think it is very limited at all. How about PV = nRT, or F = m1*m2/r^2. Ceterus peribus, does temperature "cause" pressure or vice versa? Does force "cause" mass?

      Events are "explained" when they follow a law, not because of some structural equation model or experiment with rejected null hypothesis. I think people thought I was kidding with my earlier post. I am not. Once you start seeing "causal this" and "causal that" you can be pretty sure the paper is not very valuable. Causality is not very important at all, but you can waste insane amounts of time and money generating conflicting evidence while chasing after that red herring, which is why academia loves it.

      • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Francis on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:10PM

        by Francis (5544) on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:10PM (#436953)

        In other words, you don't actually understand what those equations mean and are trying to bluff your way through it. Your second equation there is wrong. You're missing G as well as the units not coming out. Gravity is F=G(M1)(M2)/(r^2). Without that G, the units don't come out right.

        As for causation, you have no way of knowing which variables are independent and which ones are dependent if you haven't determined the causality. Trying to make a dependent variable independent is a huge waste of time roughly equivalent to creating epicycles rather than acknowledging the orbits of the planets as being elipses.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @07:35PM (#436959)

          The value of G depends on the units, it is usual to use units so that G=1. The dependent/independent variable stuff you mention is just begging the question. I dont care unless I am choosing which goes on which axis of a scatter plot, etc. If you care so much to design your research around such considerations, you are doing it wrong.

      • (Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday December 05 2016, @07:40AM

        by Magic Oddball (3847) on Monday December 05 2016, @07:40AM (#437092) Journal

        Once you start seeing "causal this" and "causal that" you can be pretty sure the paper is not very valuable. Causality is not very important at all

        Except in medicine (including psychiatry), where knowing the cause of a disease or disorder is typically a crucial aspect of knowing exactly what is going wrong and how (or if) to treat it.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @11:05AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @11:05AM (#437121)

          I mentioned medical research ("waste insane amounts of time and money generating conflicting evidence"). http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165 [plos.org]

          So no, I don't agree they are doing things right. I had to quit because interacting with that sham was so depressing and stressful.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Sunday December 04 2016, @11:55PM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday December 04 2016, @11:55PM (#437014) Journal

      Real scientists primarily care about causation. A large part of understanding the mechanics of something are understanding the cause and the effects of it.

      Real scientists in the nineteenth century, that is. Repeat after all of us, Francis: "Correlation does not imply causation." Mechanics is engineering, or stipulative; we intend certain effects, and use whatever "laws of nature" we think we have to cause them. But science has the problem that we are not trying to produce the effect, it already presents itself. We try to explain a causal mechanism, but as David Hume pointed out, causation is not something you can observe, we only have something happening after something else happens. Yes, if we see the same thing following the same action repeatedly, we might suspect there is a causal relation, but we can never actually know. What we have is a strong correlation of two events, and that is as far as we can reasonably go.

      With medicine, however, things are worse, or better, depending on how you look at it. Physicians are not looking for causes, they are looking for therapy, and they are only interested in causes to the degree that these correlations might result in treatment. If a treatment works, investigating why is of no interest to doctors! So, for example, the prescribing of ritalin for ADHD has effects, counter-intuitively, since giving a stimulant to someone already hyper-active would seem to violate all common sense causality. But it works. Why? Well, ADHD patients, as you are fond of telling me, have "something wrong with their brains". What? Well, we don't really know. Sorting out the relation between the AD and the HD might help in this regard, as concerns medicine. But a straightforward "cause"? Correlations, strong, repeatable correlations. That is enough. So the GP is correct, if a little too flippant, in saying scientists "don't care" about causes.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @05:29PM (#436923)

    In many instances there is NO practical experiment you can do to determine causation. This is especially so with psychology.

    So you have to do what you can. And many important breakthroughs have been discovered this way.

    What you don't do is just give up.

    It must be nice to live in your black and white perfect world where everything just works out for you, you are all knowing and in control of everything...