41–50 of 73 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoops. I guess I'm uninformed on this one, but I thought the whole "Flouridation is bad" thing had some basis in truth? There have been a few other articles about it on HN. Any chance I can get a more elaborate correction?
Here's some decent background: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/the-sanest-arguments...
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It is naive postulation to dismiss the paper for not addressing a variable, when you have not even read the paper to know whether they addressed the variable. Further, your cursory read of the abstract somehow missed the clause "after controlling for socioeconomic status"
But socioeconomic status might not be the confounding variable. It could be something more like "civilization" or "the amount of pro-health resources in the community". Fluoride and child doctors are both things that contribute to health, and different communities make different decisions about how much importance they want to place on childhood health. I also suspect that fluoridation does not track with socioeconom…
Things to note: they soaked cultures of rat hippocampus neurons in various concentrations of sodium fluoride. They didn't make the rats drink fluorinated water. It's difficult for fluoride to cross the blood brain barrier.
Ugh. I hate to think of all of the "I told you so's" from the misguided people in Portland who continually vote against fluoridating the water with no actual scientific basis for doing so.
I understand the whole fluoride issue has been tainted by conspiracy theories, but honestly, it's not that unscientific to think that ingesting a known endocrine disruptor might have a biological effect.
I think science articles should be banned from HN. The userbase is clearly not educated well enough to deal with the issues. It only produces comments from armchair scientists conjuring up whatever pet theory they can explain away the results with. Comments like the classic freshman stats quote "correlation does not equal causation", or the standard response starting with "Judging from the abstract", or the always in…
> For all the intellectual firepower of people in the tech community, there is a curious strain of anti-intellectualism that comes forth in projects like this; an eagerness to discount the expertise of people who have studied a subject for their entire lives, just because they weren't CS majors. It's like trying to send a man to the moon without working with any aerospace engineers. I honestly do not understand it.
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I think the 'controlling for socioeconomic status" was just between the states, not an all encompassing control of economic status. Two states with a similar rise in economic activity and ADHD wouldn't fail afoul of the control. Maybe. This article might hold up, but my past experience with statistics in medical papers does not give me great hope. For a while, my job was to review the math in interesting papers (well…
It would be a statistical sin to determine that after seeing N papers with an error, that the N+1th would certainly have an error. Extrapolating the specific error without even seeing the paper is closer to rhetoric than science.
Again: the paper might be correct, but past experience has taught me to be skeptical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the 'controlling for socioeconomic status" was just between the states, not an all encompassing control of economic status. Two states with a similar rise in economic activity and ADHD wouldn't fail afoul of the control. Maybe. This article might hold up, but my past experience with statistics in medical papers does not give me great hope. For a while, my job was to review the math in interesting papers (well…
It would be a statistical sin to determine that after seeing N papers with an error, that the N+1th would certainly have an error. Extrapolating the specific error without even seeing the paper is closer to rhetoric than science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But socioeconomic status might not be the confounding variable. It could be something more like "civilization" or "the amount of pro-health resources in the community". Fluoride and child doctors are both things that contribute to health, and different communities make different decisions about how much importance they want to place on childhood health. I also suspect that fluoridation does not track with socioeconom…
I wonder if this is the rat study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378427408... Things to note: they soaked cultures of rat hippocampus neurons in various concentrations of sodium fluoride. They didn't make the rats drink fluorinated water. It's difficult for fluoride to cross the blood brain barrier.
> Fluoride can readily cross the placenta, accumulate in the infant brain and easily exert neurotoxic effects, such as decreasing norepinephrine in the parietal and occipital lobes, decreasing serotonin in the parietal lobe and increasing serotonin in the frontal and occipital lobes [42-45].
So maybe it passes the blood-brain barrier more easily in infants or in utero?
Also if you search for "rats' in the original article, http://www.ehjournal.net/content/pdf/s12940-015-0003-1.pdf then you'll see them referencing studies that has rats drink or be injected with fluoride. They weren't referencing the study you linked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But socioeconomic status might not be the confounding variable. It could be something more like "civilization" or "the amount of pro-health resources in the community". Fluoride and child doctors are both things that contribute to health, and different communities make different decisions about how much importance they want to place on childhood health. I also suspect that fluoridation does not track with socioeconom…
I wonder if this is the rat study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378427408... Things to note: they soaked cultures of rat hippocampus neurons in various concentrations of sodium fluoride. They didn't make the rats drink fluorinated water. It's difficult for fluoride to cross the blood brain barrier.
From the abstract: "For prenatal exposures, dams received injections (SC) of 0.13 mg/kg NaF or saline on gestational days 14-18 or 17-19. Weanlings received drinking water containing 0, 75, 100, or 125 ppm F for 6 or 20 weeks, and 3 month-old adults received water containing 100 ppm F for 6 weeks."
About 90 percent of the fluoride that is added to the water takes the form not of pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride but ... fluorosilicic acid ... This material is a byproduct of phosphate fertilizer manufacturing ... several studies have suggested that this form of fluoride can leach lead from pipes. ...other work shows that children in fluoridated areas have elevated blood lead levels, and fluoride may also increase the absorption of lead into the body... Lead itself is a potent neurotoxin and has been shown to play a role in ADHD.
What is the likelihood that in areas with lower spending on municipal water that lead pipes are still used and they use the cheapest for of fluoridation available?
This freaks me out a little.
I think science articles should be banned from HN. The userbase is clearly not educated well enough to deal with the issues. It only produces comments from armchair scientists conjuring up whatever pet theory they can explain away the results with. Comments like the classic freshman stats quote "correlation does not equal causation", or the standard response starting with "Judging from the abstract", or the always in…