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Comment by zeristor | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be quite a dense paper, I’ve just scrolled through thid study of Iranian children, although the sample size of 30 seems quite low.

However since I’m learning statistics this is the first time I’ve noticed the use of the Kolmgorov-Smirnov test in the wild, so I’ll be trying to go through it in more detail to see how K-S is used from a different angle.

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The statistics for this paper are pretty straight forward. The sample size is small, so recovering a significant effect with frequentist hypothesis tests like MANOVA with 30 samples is challenging. However, the authors went to great lengths to filter out subjects with confounding factors. So even though the final sample size is small, it's intentionlly focused on the main effects of the study.

Ok, so can you say the results? Spent a couple minutes reading and still have no idea what they are trying to say.

I think the most interesting conclusion is that ASD (particularly "High Functioning" ASD) may actually be ADHD. Clinicians should do more rigorous testing to differentiate ASD and ADHD in their patients. Also, they add that "High Functioning" may not be a useful label. ASD is ASD. They demonstrate that IQ tests alone aren't that great a tool for comparing intelligence for people with high-functioning ASD vs typically ASD. But that some differences in subjects emerge when you use other measures of intelligence. They add that "subjects with high-functioning ASD showed a good competence in Matrix Reasoning and weaknesses in Comprehension." This means that people with a high-functioning ASD may be better at reasoning through complex spatial problems (like puzzles, mazes, matrix operations and linear algebra, solving rubix cubes :P) than a typical person with ASD.

They also note that the prevalence of ADHD symptoms and diagnoses are unusually high in ASD populations (37-85%). You can see the how strongly correlated ADHD symptoms are with ASD in their indices in their Tables 1 & 5 -- look at the negative effect with comprehension that's shared with typical symptoms in people with ASD's in table 5.

So, if you are a high functioning Aspie -- you may actually just be ADHD. And in other cultures, your profile may look very different than what is manifested in the West. Maybe shedding that label is important to you. It isn't to me.

It might be useful to you to know that your post was dead. I vouched for it, but you might have triggered some screening criteria.

Thx, mate. I'm a TOR user. Happens all the time.

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