On October 12, Fox News Digital reported an October 7 JAMA Psychiatry study of 187,341 US adults aged 50 and older. Its headline says dementia risk “more than quadruples” and omits ADHD and the 6.7% and 3.4% rates. Nine words, and two of them hold something back. The headline gives a multiplier and keeps the thing being multiplied: no starting rate, no name for the disorder. Fox’s second paragraph names ADHD. Its fourth gives the rates, 6.7% with ADHD against 3.4% without, and calls that “nearly twice the rate”. Only the fifth brings back “more than four times the risk”. The page says the plain thing, below the line most readers stop at. The headline leans on a habit of the mind: a number that arrives with nothing to compare it with feels as big as it sounds, the base rate left out. “Quadruples” is a naked number, a multiplier with no base, no period and no group named. The base here is 3.4%. The tell to keep: a multiplier in a headline with no starting figure beside it. The study itself is a retrospective look at 187,341 adults 50 and older in the NIH All of Us records. Pitt’s release raises the chance that early dementia gets mistaken for ADHD, though the link held with at least 8 years between diagnoses. Medscape’s headline names ADHD and “MCI, Dementia”; WESA’s says “linked”. The Fox reader is left with fear of an unnamed condition and nothing to do with it.
