r/skeptic • u/Budget_Shallan • 25d ago

💩 Misinformation Neuroscientist podcaster with 20+ hours of ADHD content discovers it MIGHT be genetic "but there are too many variables to separate"!!!

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u/Special-Garlic1203 25d ago

Yeah he's almost exactly opposite of correct. They are strongly confident there is a large hereditary component, and then the complexity of potential trait expression/severity and if it could be "created" during fetal development are big questions marks.  The difficulty of separating factors is making it hard to establish how much isn't purely hereditary. The hereditary component is what we're confident about (and some of the difficulty in separating factors is because so many of things that correlate with increased chances of ADHD children.....are behaviors that are probably more common in ADHD adult. Where we know it's severely under diagnosed espeically in women. So a huge amount of correlational data we've collected isn't very useful.

Me, my brother, and my dad are all diagnosed. It's extremely obvious my grandma had it. You'd have to be the dumbest mf-er in the world to think it was insightful to point this out in 2025. 

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u/Many_Angle9065 25d ago

Yes, this comes down to the difference between heritability and genetic traits. Heritability is the probability that if you have a trait your offspring (or relative) will also have that trait. We'd describe a trait as 'genetic' when we know the particular gene which is inherited to result in a trait, (or when the heritability is strong enough to conclusively show a genetic basis). In theory every heritable trait is probably genetic (to some degree) but this is hard to know when you're looking at something behavioral, neurological or psychiatric - this is because of how the human brain works in terms of learning and things.

Now, to my knowledge, while there is strong evidence of heritability in ADD/ADHD, there is no known genetic basis for the disease (I may be out of date on this however, I'd love to hear that somebody found an allele). This is kind of a common thing for human neuropsychiatric disorders, as learning and human development are so important in eventual human behavior (and neuropsychiatric disorders).