[chownie]

I can corroborate this, with an oddly well timed recent event.

In school I had a large friend group, none of us were diagnosed (publicly) with anything. We spent a few years together and then all scattered across the country and did not particularly keep good contact.

Cut to a decade and a half later, I'm attending a good friend's wedding back in my home town at the beginning of this month. I was diagnosed very late with autism back in 2019, then at the celebrations I discover the vast majority of my friends have had their own either autism or ADHD diagnoses since we last saw one another. Our crew ended up somewhere like a 3/4 or a 4/5 with a diagnosis, from a group larger than 30.

If we were included in the study's population, would the authors have declared that we "transmitted" these conditions to one another?