UQ neuroscientist, Dr Ross Cunnington said there appeared to be a biological difference in young boys that made them more susceptible to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, combined type (ADHD-CT).
what’s not clear to me from the little summary is whether the research proves (or even implies) that this is a gender thing: that boys have a higher physiological pre-disposition to ADHD than girls. the article doesn’t say that. and the study seems to have only had boys in its sample. so, maybe the study is ONLY saying that there seems to be a biological cause for ADHD in some boys, because they didn’t study girls.
(ht to bob c)
Yeah…they are not making a comparison of boys to girls. They are making a comparison of boys with ADHD to boys without ADHD. (Gender is not the dependent variable, ADHD is)
What it is saying is that among boys who have ADHD, they can show that their brains are acting a little differently than boys who do not have it. Which is good news for guilt-ridden parents who fear they have messed their child up. I imagine (but don’t know) that if you studies girls who have ADHD you would see that their brains act differently than the brains of girls who do not have it.