Why do viral infections have a stronger effect on IQ than bacterial?
Parasites seem to also have a significant impact on IQ and poverty as well.
Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#42Why do viral infections have a stronger effect on IQ than bacterial?
Parasites seem to also have a significant impact on IQ and poverty as well.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#43This 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.
Anecdotally: I'm a week away from turning 39 and I don't feel I've lost any "raw" mental ability, but actual performance has gotten more challenging because I'm pulled in many more directions at once.
Very few people face the same level of obligations at 20 as they will at 30 or 40.
There's also the Dunning-Kruger effect: the better you get at something, the worse you feel you are at it... presumably, all of us have made strides towards mastering our craft in the last 10 or 20 years....
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#44It's probably not the infection itself, but the fluoroquinolones or other bacteriocidal antibiotics that they give people, that are causing mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain. -_-
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"temporal association" is the point that shortly after infections, there is a stronger effect on intelligence. So you're saying "maybe people who get hit in the head with 2x4s are just dumber" and they're saying "that doesn't explain why they do so bad on cognitive tests right after they got hit". It's much stronger evidence that way.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#46Earlier 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.
That's way too early in life for signs of cognitive decline. Are you challenging yourself enough? Do you get adequate and deep rest? Are you preoccupied or depressed? Are you keeping yourself healthy? I know, these are personal (and maybe somewhat condescending-sounding) questions - but they're just examples for things that can impact your mental performance. Generally, the body's ability to take punishment starts to…
> Do you get adequate and deep rest?
This is key.
I have noticed the same symptoms as the parent. And I can't be blamed by not challenging my brain enough - I am learning Haskell, doing a side project and there's the day job.
If I had to measure myself, I'd guess that I'm working at 40% of what I was in my 20's (I'm 34). However, I probably have sleep apnea (I say probably because my doctor asked me to get a bunch of exams and I'm not through with all of them yet, only thing I know for certain is that the blood pressure is higher than it should be). I self medicate with copious amounts of caffeine and yet I'm always feeling sleepy and hazy, as if I were not fully out in the real world.
So yeah, the other poster likely has some underlying health condition. Which could be as simple as not getting enough sleep. I can't function at all with less than 8 hours, while I could in my youth.
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 scie…
Could you point me to a starting point for understanding the new more robust approaches?
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#48It's probably not the infection itself, but the fluoroquinolones or other bacteriocidal antibiotics that they give people, that are causing mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain. -_-
Never thought bout this, but it's clear that it's possible to have an "antibiotic" that target the mitochondria but leave the rest of the cell alive (for a while). That will be a poison, and be not useful as a actual antibiotic. I there a well know substance like this?
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#49I'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.
I would assume a normal distribution where 68% of the population land between 85 and 115. Or a movement of .4 SD. [0]
Nearly 16% of people would lie between 97 and 103. [1]
It's 40% of a full letter grade[2]
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation [1]http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=area+e%5E%28-1%2F450+%2... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_...
Re: Infection inflicts a persistent decrease in IQ: study with 180,000 participants
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's way too early in life for signs of cognitive decline. Are you challenging yourself enough? Do you get adequate and deep rest? Are you preoccupied or depressed? Are you keeping yourself healthy? I know, these are personal (and maybe somewhat condescending-sounding) questions - but they're just examples for things that can impact your mental performance. Generally, the body's ability to take punishment starts to…
> Do you get adequate and deep rest? This is key. I have noticed the same symptoms as the parent. And I can't be blamed by not challenging my brain enough - I am learning Haskell, doing a side project and there's the day job. If I had to measure myself, I'd guess that I'm working at 40% of what I was in my 20's (I'm 34). However, I probably have sleep apnea (I say probably because my doctor asked me to get a bunch of…
> I self medicate with copious amounts of caffeine and yet I'm always feeling sleepy and hazy, as if I were not fully out in the real world.
Have you tried stopping? I mean, too much caffeine makes me sleepy too (not over the same say, but after a while).