'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#101

Post by Alex3917 » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:08 PM UTC

Killah911 wrote: post #82

Alex3917 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caffeine is actually much more dangerous for babies than either crack or alcohol. After caffeine the second highest drug-related risk factor may actually be not smoking weed; that is, mothers who don't smoke enough weed during pregnancy may have a much higher rate of infant mortality: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/100/1/79

> mothers who don't smoke enough weed I don't see any part where the talk about the "amount" of drugs consumed? There were rougly 1600+ babies who were used as control and ~338 who tested positive for "weed". Some of the things that aren't broken down is the distribution for infant mortality. Perhaps there were outliers in the control group such as premature babies, which, if taken into account might explain some of…

> I don't see any part where the talk about the "amount" of drugs consumed?

What I meant is that if cannabis does confer some sort of protective benefit, then by definition the benefits would have to come from use that was above some minimum level, and perhaps also below some maximum level.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#102

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:10 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #71

rayiner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either. The prevalence of fetal alcohol syndrome is less than 5% for babies of women who drink more than 14 drinks per week during pregnancy: http://www.motherisk.org/prof/updatesDetail.jsp?content_id=2... . There's very little evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy are bad for babies: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023984,00.ht…

Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either. So you're basically saying that it's OK to roll the dice with a child, since after all it's only a 20-sided die? That a mother's temporary gratification is more important than a 5% chance of your child suffering damage?

[deleted]

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#103

Post by Daishiman » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:10 PM UTC

bittired wrote: post #67

antoko wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error. "Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.

IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor. Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from…

> Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap.

Except that welfare actually works, and despite the fact that poor people are in general poor money managers, a marginal income that improves some environmental variables goes a lon way towards improving intelligence. Especially when it translates to greater food availability.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#104

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:10 PM UTC

bittired wrote: post #28

6d0debc071 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being poor does not cause lower IQ Down the page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 - we have lancewiggs saying that the results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty. What basis do you have for your claim?

Here is the logic: 1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world. 2. Take all of their money away. 3. Give it to the other 50%. Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ? DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!

Is the concept of 'causes' so hard? Severe lack of money, over a period of years, causes bad nutrition which causes development to be impaired.

This causation takes time.

The amount of money at a specific moment is meaningless because it's 0% of the experimental window. Look at the average and compare it to food and necessity prices.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#105

Post by sopooneo » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:11 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #94

cleaver wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the reason for total abstinence is while there may be a shoulder in the graph (eg. more than 5 drinks a week) beyond which FAS begins to take effect, nobody knows where that point is. It's not exactly the sort of thing you want to run a controlled test for. It would be great if we could tell expecting mothers: "have two drinks a week, you'll be fine." We don't know, so "don't drink at all" is a re…

The studies have not proven that there is a level of alcohol consumption below which there are no negative effects, but they fail to demonstrate long-term negative effects from low levels of alcohol consumption. Now, absence of proof is not proof of absence, but in what other contexts do we tell people: the studies don't show harmful effects at low levels, but you shouldn't do it anyway because the studies haven't pr…

It could also be a matter of public health advocates being savvy about how their messages are received. If we say it's probably safe to drink d drinks per week, then some percentage p of the population will assume it's okay to drink x*d drinks per week and may harm their babies.

Also, simple rules are easy to state and simple to follow. The words "never" and "always" are very clear and leave no room for misinterpretation.

However, if any of my speculation is correct, and public health messages are tuned to account for their real world affect, than perhaps there is a risk that they will loose credibility.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#106

Post by Alex3917 » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:12 PM UTC

jvm wrote: post #95

Alex3917 wrote: post #52

"They found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time." That's not really much different than the national average for kids whose parents aren't crackheads. E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age s…

> E.g. 1 in 20 kids see someone get shot every year, so you would expect that by age seven that 7 in 20 would have, which is in fact exactly 35%. This is insane logic. Think about your 20 closest friends. Do you think that 7 of them saw somebody get shot by the time they were 7? I don't know where you grew up but that is definitely not my experience! Continuing the same reasoning, 60% of all 18 year olds should have…

Supposedly it is at least 22.2% by ages 14-17 though, so perhaps 25% by age 18. So it is the same order of magnitude at least as the naive assumption. My point is just that exposure to violence isn't especially rare across the entire population.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#107

Post by raldi » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:13 PM UTC

I've read that it's notoriously difficult to measure the impact of crack on prenatal development because so many crack-smoking pregnant women also smoke cigarettes, and the latter is so harmful already that it's hard to isolate the effects of the former.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#108

Post by Daishiman » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:13 PM UTC

bittired wrote: post #26

rtpg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure growing up in poverty can negatively influence access to mentally stimulating things. Not saying that the number on the bank account directly influences IQ, but tackling poverty would probably have ripples in the school system too.

This is going in a bad direction for sure now, but here is this thing: Some people, regardless of race, have lower intellectual capacity. That is what IQ tests try to measure, but fail to do completely because a lot is still based on education and experience that is difficult to factor out of the tests. A greater number of those people that have less intellectual capacity are not going to be as financially successful…

Except that intellectual capacity is evidently not the main factor in determining the poverty level of people; it's certainly among one of the variables, but the fact that poor people are better off in some systems and countries rather than others and social mobility also varies substantially, it means that there's a ton of things that can work as government policy to improve the situation.

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#109

Post by tptacek » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:15 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #79

gd1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said it was 5% for mothers that have 14 drinks per week or more. It will be much less (if not zero) for someone who has 2-3 drinks a week, which is his point.

I'm not informed on this topic but I'd like to point out that "14 drinks per week" is "two glasses of wine per day", which sounds like a lot less. You're not getting smashed or even buzzed on a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.

What does fetal alcohol syndrome have to do with intoxication?

Re: 'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

#110

Post by rayiner » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 4:15 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #79

gd1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said it was 5% for mothers that have 14 drinks per week or more. It will be much less (if not zero) for someone who has 2-3 drinks a week, which is his point.

I'm not informed on this topic but I'd like to point out that "14 drinks per week" is "two glasses of wine per day", which sounds like a lot less. You're not getting smashed or even buzzed on a couple of glasses of wine with dinner.

10+% of women self-report as binge drinking during the first trimester, and the FAS rate is only about 0.05-0.2%: http://fasdcenter.samhsa.gov/documents/WYNK_Numbers.pdf.