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Immune signalling and neural context
Immune signalling and neural context are research questions, not a universal cause. Established immune biology is not proof that ADHD is universally inflammatory.
Immune signalling and neural context
Evidence interpretation
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Innate immune receptor cascades describe established cellular signalling. Microglia also have roles in brain development and responses to injury; a cited mouse experiment investigated synaptic pruning. Those observations do not demonstrate the same mechanism in every human or establish an inflammatory or autoimmune cause of ADHD. Any ADHD-specific immune claim needs its own human study, phenotype, direction-of-effect and confounding assessment. The figure therefore separates normal biological context from an unproven clinical hypothesis.
What the diagram shows
Innate immune receptor cascades describe established cellular signalling. Microglia also have roles in brain development and responses to injury; a cited mouse experiment investigated synaptic pruning. Those observations do not demonstrate the same mechanism in every human or establish an inflammatory or autoimmune cause of ADHD. Any ADHD-specific immune claim needs its own human study, phenotype, direction-of-effect and confounding assessment. The figure therefore separates normal biological context from an unproven clinical hypothesis.