Just as the title asks I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they’re reading.

They’ll read it and despite all the information being there, if it’s even slightly out of line from the most straightforward sentence structure, they act like it’s complete gibberish or indecipherable.

Has anyone else noticed this? Because honestly it’s making me lose my fucking mind.

  • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Table 3 and Table 4 aren’t combined because they assessed different regions of interest. The tables don’t contradict each other, because they don’t even include the same ROIs:

    Presented in Table 4 are ROIs that were assessed in only two studies and show significant SMDs between the ADHD and control subjects.

    As for the heterogeneity, the paper notes which ROIs failed to remain statistically significant after correction. The Prefrontal region is not included this list:

    Although frontal gray and white matter and premotor ROIs show substantial SMDs ranging from .59 to .75, they also show statistically significant levels of heterogeneity, indicating rather variable results across the two studies in each meta-analysis. Due to the lack of power for the meta-analyses in this table, we need to interpret these results with caution. For example, the measures of intracranial volume, frontal lobe, right amygdala, and the splenium using the O’Kusky et al. (1988) method failed to remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons.

    As you say, the studies aren’t golden, but that’s why I picked a meta-analysis. To be honest, if I knew I was going to be held to such a high standard, I would have just kept my mouth shut!

    • Blake [he/him]
      1·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think that’s quite right - I no longer have the study in front of me to reference and I may have misread it, but if I remember correctly, the definition of Table 3 is the findings of studies that DO NOT show significant SMDs and Table 4 is studies that DO. If you look at the descriptions of table 3 and table 4 and compare then I think you’ll see what I mean. It may even be in the titles of the tables, I’ll check it again when I get home in case I misread, in which case I apologise.

      And yeah, the authors call out the high probability of chance for those regions especially, but that doesn’t mean the other regions are perfect either - the data is all there in table 4, you can look for yourself! It’s the heterogeneity columns, the lower the p value, the more likely the effect is consistent. A p value of 0.05 is usually considered the baseline for statistical significance, or for meta analyses with low sample sizes (such as this one), it’s not unreasonable to consider higher values significant because of differences in methodology, but these are some pretty high values.

      I’m not saying that any of this is reason enough to fully discount the findings, or that there’s no correlation found by the studies, it’s just that, in my personal opinion, the quantity of the data is significantly too low, too narrow in scope, and the margin of error is too large to use the data to say “yes, we can identify differences in brain volume between an average person with ADHD, and an average person without ADHD” with any confidence.

      At best, you could say that “given an average white male child with ADHD, there’s a higher than normal chance that the prefrontal regions of their brain would be lower than average” and even that is quite an opinionated stance tbh

      I’m sorry for making you feel attacked though, you seem to have made the claim in good faith, it’s just that a lot of people make claims like that in poor faith and use it to justify treating people with neurological differences as inferior people or even as subhuman, so I think it’s important that people don’t make broad statements about how science has proven that people with ADHD have smaller brains or whatever.