Interesting study. Intelligence and the immune system share a common property in that they are have a very large number of genes influencing them (several thousand). I would not be surprised if there is quite a bit of overlap in the genes that contibute to both intelligence and immunity. What we might be seeing here is the effect of null mutations in genes that effect both immunity and intellegence.
Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#32I've only read the abstract, but it looks like the actual effect isn't huge.
People with 10 hospitalizations scored lower by .37 SD = 6 iq points.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#33This sort of news really scare me. Your brain defines who you are and what capabilities you have, and damaging it can completely change you. The brain is very responsible for a big part of your success and losing it can have a big impact in your life.
Cognitive decline happens whether you like it or not, I'm afraid to say. I've hit my early 30s and I've started noticing that I'm far more prone to inappropriately replaced words, can't memorise long strings of digits as well as I used to be able to, and so-forth.
It's possible to push oneself "harder" and regain function ("neuroplasticity"), as evidenced by stroke rehab.
This is why it's vital to do challenging mental exercises like crosswords puzzles, etc. ("use it or lose it.)
Generally though, the article makes sense because the common cell machinery of nerves (which don't divide as much as say intenstine or dermis cells) can be hampered by underlying issues affecting organelles within nerve cells, which then manifests as functional, quantitative deficit at the macro level.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#34Interesting study, but as the authors concede, one can't quite rule out that the causal flow is in the opposite direction to that which they propose - that is, people with lower cognitive ability are more likely to end up with infections, and people with much lower cognitive ability are more likely to end up with severe infections. I mean, consider people with dementia, sat in their own faeces (at the severely dimini…
I'm sympathetic to your point of view; in some cases it seems nearly impossible to rigorously exclude reverse-associations when there are so many complexities. The authors respond to this objection as follows: The finding that infections are associated with decreased general cognitive ability after a latency period might be an epiphenomenon and not a biologically-mediated relationship. For instance, a reverse associa…
How do the authors manage to just wave away all the genetic effects with just "this probably does not account for the observed temporal association"? Either the authors have some evidence or else it is not a hypothesis that they can rule out. All their correction factors are non-genetic factors.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#35I've only read the abstract, but it looks like the actual effect isn't huge. People with 10 hospitalizations scored lower by .37 SD = 6 iq points.
> Cognitive ability score (Børge Prien’s Prøve Test) has here been converted to parallel conventional IQ scaling, with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, to give a more familiar metric of effect size.
I have no idea what 6 points mean in this setting.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#36The p-value (a function used for testing a statistical hypothesis) corresponding to these results was less than 0.001, indicating that the probability that the findings were due to chance alone (or that the null hypothesis is true) is less than 0.1%. Actually, I think it means that IF the null hypothesis is true, there is only a 0.1% chance that we would get this much deviation (or more) from it due to chance. Which…
The whole science industry should follow the lead of those scientific journals who've banned p-values from their publications. P-values just lead to so much confusion and nonsense.
And that's without even considering the scientists who cheat the p-values, which is actually just a tiny part of the problem with p-values.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#37This sort of news really scare me. Your brain defines who you are and what capabilities you have, and damaging it can completely change you. The brain is very responsible for a big part of your success and losing it can have a big impact in your life.
Cognitive decline happens whether you like it or not, I'm afraid to say. I've hit my early 30s and I've started noticing that I'm far more prone to inappropriately replaced words, can't memorise long strings of digits as well as I used to be able to, and so-forth.
I'm in my late 40s. Definitely I'm not the same person, cognitively, that I was in my 20s. It's not all bad, though. I'm sure I would score lower in an IQ test, but I'm actually more capable than I was back then. Experience counts for a lot. I can deal with emotional stress much better, or perhaps I can avoid the situations which cause it (more likely). I can see other people's point of view a lot easier now. I can see gradations in judgement, where before everything was black and white.
It sucks to lose the horse power, but I more than make up for it by driving the car in the right direction. I suspect the decline will continue, but in many ways I look forward to what I will be able to accomplish when I'm older.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cognitive decline happens whether you like it or not, I'm afraid to say. I've hit my early 30s and I've started noticing that I'm far more prone to inappropriately replaced words, can't memorise long strings of digits as well as I used to be able to, and so-forth.
> I've hit my early 30s and I've started noticing that I'm far more prone to inappropriately replaced words, Is this an example of that? Did you mean 'placed' or do I mis-understand you?
Not the guy you're asking, but I recently said "portico" when I meant to say "patio." I mixed up the two words because they both start with a P and have something to do with architecture. I think this is the kind of thing he meant by "replacement," and it's been happening to me (55) more frequently in recent years.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#39The p-value (a function used for testing a statistical hypothesis) corresponding to these results was less than 0.001, indicating that the probability that the findings were due to chance alone (or that the null hypothesis is true) is less than 0.1%. Actually, I think it means that IF the null hypothesis is true, there is only a 0.1% chance that we would get this much deviation (or more) from it due to chance. Which…
The whole science industry should follow the lead of those scientific journals who've banned p-values from their publications. P-values just lead to so much confusion and nonsense. And that's without even considering the scientists who cheat the p-values, which is actually just a tiny part of the problem with p-values.
I think that the outright banning of p-values is not the right way to go. The researchers that misuse them and the reviewers that apparently don't understand them are a much bigger problem than the p-value metric itself.
What's needed is a better understanding of empirical conditional statistics and the application of that understanding to the degign of experiments and the analysis of the results produced therefrom.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole science industry should follow the lead of those scientific journals who've banned p-values from their publications. P-values just lead to so much confusion and nonsense. And that's without even considering the scientists who cheat the p-values, which is actually just a tiny part of the problem with p-values.
I think that the outright banning of p-values is not the right way to go. The researchers that misuse them and the reviewers that apparently don't understand them are a much bigger problem than the p-value metric itself. What's needed is a better understanding of empirical conditional statistics and the application of that understanding to the degign of experiments and the analysis of the results produced therefrom.
And the best way to do that is to eliminate the crutch.
Many of the more data-centric fields did away with p-values long ago in favor of far more robust approaches to establishing the value of a paper. Look at papers in the data science field. Using p-values in a paper there would get you laughed out of the industry fast.
Only problem that p-values ever solved was allowing journal reviewers to be lazier, helping scientists to be lazier, and making writing more sensational press releases easier.