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