r/skeptic • u/Budget_Shallan • 25d ago

đŸ’© 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/premium_drifter 25d ago

It's almost like it's really hard to get kids with ADHD out the door or something

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u/Sguru1 25d ago

Not just that but we legit have a lot of data on the genetic heritability of adhd including twin studies and genome wide association studies. Home boy is a phd in neuroscience so he either knows this already or could have found it in a 5 minute pubmed search. Odd that hes acting brand new.

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u/BioMed-R 25d ago

Heritability is a hoax metric. It has conceptual flaws that have been known for decades and that’s why these 80% range heritabilities (the average heritability of all traits is 50%) shrink to 10% or less when you actually use genetic methods instead of twin studies.

(And I hopefully shouldn’t have to explain why it’s a problem that only 10% of a condition can be explained even when tens of thousands of patients are included in studies including tens of thousands of genetic locations, or loci.)

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u/Sguru1 25d ago edited 25d ago

I think this is a bit disingenuous when considering the context of this issue lol. First you’re saying the average heritability of all traits is 50% but to my knowledge that’s not really consistent in regard to psychiatric illnesses and the number is far lower aside from disorders such as bipolar disorder and maybe OCD / schizophrenia that are also suspected to have genetic associations. A 10-20% genetic association for bipolar disorder for example is considered remarkable enough in psychiatry to consider genetic loading as a factor in its psychometric tools for that condition (which is another argument we can probably spend an hour on lol).

Of course I’m not an expert on genetics but calling it a hoax metric certainly seems like a take. I’d be more open to that argument if we had a more significant understanding of genetics overall including complex issues like rare undiscovered variants and epigenetic involvement right? These “actual genetic methods” would have their limitations in the available catalogue of humanities genetic information. To see something like a twin study and heritability of 80% being replicated across data sets and methods and just say “oh that’s a hoax” seems a bit premature when the explanation can also be that we don’t have the genetics of the specific condition well catalogued.

We also has gwas studies suggesting genetic linkage. I don’t anyone’s arguing that it’s ONLY genetic. (Atleast here) and the only point I’m mentioning any of this is not to argue the validity of genetic research methods. As that’s not my discipline. But to point out that we atleast have some preliminary published data suggesting an association a bit richer then the observation that parents are late to their appointments. Your post gives me alot to think about though in general so thank you.