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'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result

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

#161

Post by DanBC »

smsm42 wrote: post #159
DanBC wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go careful when recommending that pregnant women should drink, especially if you're quoting general media. ( http://www.nhs.uk/news/2012/06june/Pages/daily-drinking-preg... ) > “Pregnant women can binge drink safely,” according to a report in today’s Metro. Expectant mothers should be able to “down up to 12 alcoholic beverages a week knowing it will have no ill effect on their offspring before the age of five”, the p…

>>> This is important because no one ever pours themselves 80 ml of wine. Well, this is not completely correct - in wine tastings, for example, the recommended pouring usually is about 2 oz which is under 80 ml. Of course, tasting just once is another question that gets us back to the square one...

You make an excellent point.

A wine tasting portion is a sip, that you slurp up and then spit out. No-one (I imagine) thinks of that portion as a real serving size!

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

#162

Post by smsm42 »

clavalle wrote: post #119
JulianMorrison wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who're you going to believe, a randomized controlled trial or your own lying eyes? Hint: if you believe your own eyes, your sample size is one, confirmation bias and the availability heuristic are dancing the cha-cha all over your results, and you fail at science .

Having worked with a slew of severely developmentally delayed crack babies and alcohol syndrome kids, I am going to have to go with my own eyes. This study did not include pre-term crack babies. That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users. Crack or cocaine is very, very bad for development. It can create a child that literally cannot do anything for themselves and some that li…

Heavy crack users would have, I presume, a wide array of other problems, from bad nutrition to bad living conditions to physical abuse to child neglect. So singling out one chemical and attributing a problem of a life in complete disarray to it seems wrong, especially if statistics suggest otherwise. Unless you are looking for an easy political fix - we'd just eliminate crack and all problems would go away! But then it turns out chemical is not a problem, the life that makes using the chemical an attractive option is.

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

#163

Post by pyre »

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…

  | We do it because we as a society love to
  | control women
This is a ridiculous claim. If anything erring on the side of caution and telling pregnant women not to drink alcohol falls under the "Think of the Children" banner. It's an effort to prevent babies from being born with issues, rather than some need to tell women to 'get back in the kitchen.'

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

#164

Post by josephlord »

raldi wrote: post #138
clavalle wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make a lot of sense since there are plenty of pregnant tobacco smokers that don't smoke crack.

I'm not following; could you elaborate?

The control group should be smokers not non-smokers and if all the cocaine using group are also smokers the difference should be the effect of the cocaine.

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

#165

Post by btilly »

bittired wrote: post #46
JshWright wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it not have an impact on intellectual capacity? Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development. This things are all much easier to access when you have more money.

> Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development. But not so important that they would have a 40 point IQ difference. If it is, show me the studies confirming that.

Where do you pull "40 point IQ difference" from? The gap between these impoverished kids and normal is only 20 points. And that is easily explainable with nutrition, stimulation, and education.

To start look at http://www.thewayforwardproject.org/file_uploads/Gen10%20IQ%... for a meta analysis of thousands of studies finding that the IQ difference between growing up in an orphanage and foster care averaging 20 points.

Independently, the estimated difference between average IQ in the mid-30s and today is 20 points. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect for verification. In that time period the main things that have changed are nutrition, stimulation and education.

So there you have it. Two unrelated analyses of completely different things finding that nutrition, stimulation and education can explain 20 point IQ differences between otherwise similar populations.

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

#166

Post by yusefnapora »

chrischen wrote: post #137

What's more likely, that seeing dead people and being poor lowers your IQ, or that having a low IQ means you'll end up poor? They preselected a bunch of poor people, which means the low IQ could be explained by the fact that their existing IQ put them in this place in society along with the predisposition to cheap drug addiction.

It seems like what's most likely is that you didn't read the article correctly. They were measuring the IQ of the children, not the parents. These children didn't 'end up' poor; they started life that way. Their IQ was then 10 to 20 points below average by the time they were four, regardless of the parents' cocaine usage. Or are you suggesting that four year olds with low IQ are responsible for their place in society and the poverty of their parents?

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

#167

Post by jlgreco »

sophacles wrote: post #152
jlgreco wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't really get that part either. Prematurity is something that is itself heavily studied; prematurity with crack seems like the logical thing to study.

Except... How do you know which effects come from crack + premature without subtracting out just premature and just crack?

Designing experiments in this area is not my expertise, but my inclination would be "study premature babies with and without crack" You could also simply study premature babies in general, and then study why crack seems to cause more premature babies.

I imagine somebody who is actually in this field would not have much trouble designing experiments to study premature "crack babies". Premature babies are something they chose not to study, not something that cannot be studied.

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

#168

Post by klawed »

smoyer wrote: post #17
calibraxis wrote: post #11

Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act ) There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure ) It's alcohol, a legal drug. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome )

My wife was a early-childhood development specialist at our local Easter Seals and the kids with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome were very sad. It's totally preventable, and the lack of understanding of consequences is devastating.

>It's totally preventable, and the lack of understanding of consequences is devastating. While the behavior that causes FAS is easy to stop for most women, for some segment of the population (those who are addicted to alcohol) it is seemingly impossible to eliminate or moderate alcohol consumption for even 1 week, let alone 9 months. The success of preventing FAS should correlate directly to advances in treating alcohol addiction.

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

#169

Post by twohey »

Of the 110, two are dead - one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting - three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate.

It seems rather depressing to me that the college graduation rate by 23 is under 10%. Talk about different worlds

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

#170

Post by pbhjpbhj »

raverbashing wrote: post #45
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…

You're presenting facts, the "total abstinence" people don't like that. I find it funny how the "total abstinence" people come up with such amount of unproven facts, like "any consumption of alcohol" will cause harm. You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe. This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works.

>You'll be hard pressed to find a mother that hasn't consumed any alcohol whatsoever during pregnancy in Europe. //

Amongst most groups I know of, working class and lower-middle, a female refusing an alcolholic drink [at a party] is a sign that you think you're pregnant.

Total abstinence for the entire pregnancy? Wouldn't expect a huge proportion but as a comparison to normal intake it's going to look a lot more like marked abstemiousness than anything else. I think my wife probably had 1 or 2 glasses across each of her pregnancies.

>This looks like it works as well as the "total abstinence" for sex works. //

What are you trying to say here. That abstinence from sexual interaction doesn't prevent conception or transmission of STIs. Or maybe that abstinence from alcohol in pregnancy doesn't stop fetal alcohol syndrome. ?

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