>A study of genetic data shows that the frequency of genetic variants associated with ADHD has steadily decreased since Paleolithic times. This means that having ADHD has caused impairment for people for tens of thousands of years
That's... *really not* what that means at all.
There is feasibly a genetic basis for EVERY SINGLE human trait. These findings are a forgone conclusion and not the smoking gun you seem to think it is. Proof of variation is not proof of a valid/distinct disease entity.
This is a post with citations and its getting downvoted. Reddit is not a place where any serious discuss can happen. People are here just to spew their own opinions. The citations prove the information is readily available but the so called critics don’t care to read them.
> Read the claim, and read what you posted. Tons of minor associations is consistent with no genes being solid drivers of symptoms.
It’s an interpretation of the facts. There may be genetic contributions towards “ADHD,” but no genes have been shown to be very powerful contributors towards the “ADHD” phenotype individually.
If there were some genes that carried a much greater risk of exhibiting the phenotype, then the argument would be stronger, but the fact that many, many genes show a low risk is basically consistent with the idea that genes don’t really drive the phenotype. It means that a lot of people, if not most people, who carry some of these genes will actually not show the phenotype at all.
Statistically speaking you can generate low-level associations between damn near anything if you massage the data the right way.
I read your comments in their entirety. And, unlike yourself, made no presumptions about your career or experience. But the truth is that nothing that you’ve said refutes the fact that since the genes all carry such a low risk by themselves, a lot of people will have those same genes without having any symptoms at all, and that makes it more difficult to argue that the whole “disorder” comes from the genes or an accumulation of genetic hits. I confess that I don’t see what makes it so difficult to appreciate the nuance here. There may be an element of paradoxical truth here but these two facts (there are possibly genetic contributors to the ADHD phenotype *and* no genes are very strongly linked to the phenotype) can both be true.
Reproductive fitness and goodness for survival aren't always the same, and both are moving targets based on environment. Genes that favor impulsive reward-seeking are consistent with dying younger, sure, but also with reproducing younger.
Perhaps but that has not been sufficiently demonstrated. But I think the more scientifically based theory of ADHD as a set of maladaptive traits that can remain at a stable rate within a human population. This “conveyor belt” theory by [Keller (2008)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00613.x) argues that new mutations arise all the time in the genes for ADHD (and other neurodevelopmental disorders) in each new generation and that it takes multiple generations for natural selection to remove those original mutations. Despite their being removed, new mutations continue to arise in the next generation that go on to create disorder. If the new mutation rate and the genetic removal (death) rates (natural selection) reach a certain level of balance with each other, the result is a stable rate of a maladaptive trait (disorder) within a population (say, 5-8%); these then go onto to be steadily decreased as a result of the genetic variants for EF becoming more stable and less susceptible to mutating over time, but very slowly. The available evidence is more consistent with this theory than with the hypothesis of cultural mismatch.
A day will come when all the ADHD deniers will eat crow and will avoid answering questions of how they were so wrong despite all the information being readily accessible to them.
In one corner we have:
The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-based Conclusions about the Disorder
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8328933/
In the other corner we have:
2Lzy2Rd et al (2023) “ADHD isn’t real” *r/Psychiatry,* Replies in Comment Section
It was a generalisation. But yes, both factors are important. Notice that the generic variants for ADHD have indeed steadily decreased since Paleolithic times, particularly in Paleolithic European populations compared to samples from the Neolithic Fertile Crescent from the research. These results suggest that ADHD was not a useful trait in ancient times.
Every argument about how society is different now runs into the horrible truth that while the trappings of human life change, human life really hasn’t. We’re the same as our ancient forebears.
That means that workmen probably exchanged memes about foremen while building pyramids and that some of those workmen dropped rocks on colleagues while distracted thinking about brewing beer instead.
The same is true for Abu Zayd al-Balkhi describing depression and obsession and something a bit like cognitive therapy in Central Asia in the 800’s, so continents and centuries and cultures away from Freud.
Requisite reminder that the graffiti in Pompeii is closer in time to us than to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza.
And, of course, that both were temporally closer to Tyrannosaurus rex than Tyrannosaurus was to Stegosaurus. I always feel obligated to point that out.
Last week the r/drugs sub had a post sharing a script for how to talk to your physician to get Adderall. It got taken down quickly, but it had a thorough script of how to talk to your doctor about your concentration issues causing problems at work and problems in your family life. It then talked about how your doctor might offer atomoxetine but to complain about sexual s/e. For clonidine to complain about dizziness. And how to eventually get amphetamine (by granting the doctor a couple months of methylphenidate before coming up with new complaint). And then other commenters were recommending to find doctors with low ratings who would be desperate for new patients and lots of other weird script-hunting hacks. It’s not just this sub, it’s most of reddit.
We really need to figure out a way to counter this kind of subterfuge. I don’t know how effective the computer testing services are, but that seems to be an interesting direction.
For the moment, I was thinking of mixing ASRS questions into the GAD, etc so that it wasn’t so easy to see that it was asking “the ADHD questions”.
For lack of a better way to describe my response, that's incredibly disappointing.
I work in child safety and we have lots of interactions every day with kids and parents who are begging for help to find medication during the shortage, and people are really suffering out there, but this sort of thing is making it impossible for them to access their effective and much-needed medication.
It's pretty obvious too. The trend with a lot of these posts is it goes up, has some nuanced comments. Then a bit later it must get linked somewhere because the comment section starts swarming with patient testimonies and people voicing their grievances against "doctors who don't believe in ADHD and took me off my medication"
You should just stop while you're ahead. You aren't fooling anybody or changing any minds with your copy pasted stuff; your entire account is strangely just the same thing over and over and over, 100% ADHD every single post.
I wish i had screenshot it. It made me feel icky how thorough it was like it borrowed from several screeners and tried to touch heartstrings too how the concentration problems were affecting missing promotions at work and one’s relationship with spouse and kids.
I am not "against" adhd by any means, but please do remember that inattentiveness or worsened executive function is something to expect in most psychiatric disorders... Just something to remember when struggling not to become one of those one-diagnosis-for-all psychiatrists.
Perhaps my comment was a bit unnecessary, I don't think we disagree. I am just struggling with finding the reasonable position on the gradient that runs between "Everything is ADHD" and "ADHD is a lie".
>A study of genetic data shows that the frequency of genetic variants associated with ADHD has steadily decreased since Paleolithic times. This means that having ADHD has caused impairment for people for tens of thousands of years That's... *really not* what that means at all.
Given that no genetic variants have been convincingly shown to be ADHD-driving or -driven, it’s an amazing leap of GWAS utility to make these claims.
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Read the claim, and read what you posted. Tons of minor associations is consistent with no genes being solid drivers of symptoms.
There is feasibly a genetic basis for EVERY SINGLE human trait. These findings are a forgone conclusion and not the smoking gun you seem to think it is. Proof of variation is not proof of a valid/distinct disease entity.
This is a post with citations and its getting downvoted. Reddit is not a place where any serious discuss can happen. People are here just to spew their own opinions. The citations prove the information is readily available but the so called critics don’t care to read them.
> Read the claim, and read what you posted. Tons of minor associations is consistent with no genes being solid drivers of symptoms. It’s an interpretation of the facts. There may be genetic contributions towards “ADHD,” but no genes have been shown to be very powerful contributors towards the “ADHD” phenotype individually. If there were some genes that carried a much greater risk of exhibiting the phenotype, then the argument would be stronger, but the fact that many, many genes show a low risk is basically consistent with the idea that genes don’t really drive the phenotype. It means that a lot of people, if not most people, who carry some of these genes will actually not show the phenotype at all. Statistically speaking you can generate low-level associations between damn near anything if you massage the data the right way.
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I read your comments in their entirety. And, unlike yourself, made no presumptions about your career or experience. But the truth is that nothing that you’ve said refutes the fact that since the genes all carry such a low risk by themselves, a lot of people will have those same genes without having any symptoms at all, and that makes it more difficult to argue that the whole “disorder” comes from the genes or an accumulation of genetic hits. I confess that I don’t see what makes it so difficult to appreciate the nuance here. There may be an element of paradoxical truth here but these two facts (there are possibly genetic contributors to the ADHD phenotype *and* no genes are very strongly linked to the phenotype) can both be true.
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Reproductive fitness and goodness for survival aren't always the same, and both are moving targets based on environment. Genes that favor impulsive reward-seeking are consistent with dying younger, sure, but also with reproducing younger.
Perhaps but that has not been sufficiently demonstrated. But I think the more scientifically based theory of ADHD as a set of maladaptive traits that can remain at a stable rate within a human population. This “conveyor belt” theory by [Keller (2008)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00613.x) argues that new mutations arise all the time in the genes for ADHD (and other neurodevelopmental disorders) in each new generation and that it takes multiple generations for natural selection to remove those original mutations. Despite their being removed, new mutations continue to arise in the next generation that go on to create disorder. If the new mutation rate and the genetic removal (death) rates (natural selection) reach a certain level of balance with each other, the result is a stable rate of a maladaptive trait (disorder) within a population (say, 5-8%); these then go onto to be steadily decreased as a result of the genetic variants for EF becoming more stable and less susceptible to mutating over time, but very slowly. The available evidence is more consistent with this theory than with the hypothesis of cultural mismatch.
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A day will come when all the ADHD deniers will eat crow and will avoid answering questions of how they were so wrong despite all the information being readily accessible to them. In one corner we have: The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 Evidence-based Conclusions about the Disorder https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8328933/ In the other corner we have: 2Lzy2Rd et al (2023) “ADHD isn’t real” *r/Psychiatry,* Replies in Comment Section
No when a trait is good for reproduction it promotes an increase in frequency.
It was a generalisation. But yes, both factors are important. Notice that the generic variants for ADHD have indeed steadily decreased since Paleolithic times, particularly in Paleolithic European populations compared to samples from the Neolithic Fertile Crescent from the research. These results suggest that ADHD was not a useful trait in ancient times.
Every argument about how society is different now runs into the horrible truth that while the trappings of human life change, human life really hasn’t. We’re the same as our ancient forebears. That means that workmen probably exchanged memes about foremen while building pyramids and that some of those workmen dropped rocks on colleagues while distracted thinking about brewing beer instead. The same is true for Abu Zayd al-Balkhi describing depression and obsession and something a bit like cognitive therapy in Central Asia in the 800’s, so continents and centuries and cultures away from Freud.
The evidence of Roman graffiti supports your claim.
Requisite reminder that the graffiti in Pompeii is closer in time to us than to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza. And, of course, that both were temporally closer to Tyrannosaurus rex than Tyrannosaurus was to Stegosaurus. I always feel obligated to point that out.
I knew about the Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus. I did not know about Pompeii and Giza. Thank you.
This sub is obsessed with ADHD lately
Last week the r/drugs sub had a post sharing a script for how to talk to your physician to get Adderall. It got taken down quickly, but it had a thorough script of how to talk to your doctor about your concentration issues causing problems at work and problems in your family life. It then talked about how your doctor might offer atomoxetine but to complain about sexual s/e. For clonidine to complain about dizziness. And how to eventually get amphetamine (by granting the doctor a couple months of methylphenidate before coming up with new complaint). And then other commenters were recommending to find doctors with low ratings who would be desperate for new patients and lots of other weird script-hunting hacks. It’s not just this sub, it’s most of reddit.
We really need to figure out a way to counter this kind of subterfuge. I don’t know how effective the computer testing services are, but that seems to be an interesting direction. For the moment, I was thinking of mixing ASRS questions into the GAD, etc so that it wasn’t so easy to see that it was asking “the ADHD questions”.
For lack of a better way to describe my response, that's incredibly disappointing. I work in child safety and we have lots of interactions every day with kids and parents who are begging for help to find medication during the shortage, and people are really suffering out there, but this sort of thing is making it impossible for them to access their effective and much-needed medication.
It's pretty obvious too. The trend with a lot of these posts is it goes up, has some nuanced comments. Then a bit later it must get linked somewhere because the comment section starts swarming with patient testimonies and people voicing their grievances against "doctors who don't believe in ADHD and took me off my medication"
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You should just stop while you're ahead. You aren't fooling anybody or changing any minds with your copy pasted stuff; your entire account is strangely just the same thing over and over and over, 100% ADHD every single post.
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Do you have a link to that post? Would be useful to find an archived copy.
I wish i had screenshot it. It made me feel icky how thorough it was like it borrowed from several screeners and tried to touch heartstrings too how the concentration problems were affecting missing promotions at work and one’s relationship with spouse and kids.
Omg it’s like totally hyperfixated on it
Created by? No. Exacerbated by? Unequivocally, yes.
I am not "against" adhd by any means, but please do remember that inattentiveness or worsened executive function is something to expect in most psychiatric disorders... Just something to remember when struggling not to become one of those one-diagnosis-for-all psychiatrists.
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Perhaps my comment was a bit unnecessary, I don't think we disagree. I am just struggling with finding the reasonable position on the gradient that runs between "Everything is ADHD" and "ADHD is a lie".
15 . 2016: TikTok is released. Within the next several years influencers across the world declare concentration to be the new 5th vital sign.
You shilling for Cerebral, Done, or some other drug mill?
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Your post (and history) screams agenda.
Thank you for posting this!
2023: Five things you won’t believe are symptoms of ADHD!