171–180 of 265 posts
tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."
*When not taking into account prematurely born children, which among crack users is 17–27% compared to between 3-4% for the population at large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>> 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!
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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…
fnordfnordfnord is right. I'll add: the article strongly implies that you were working with babies born into poverty , misdiagnosed and stigmatised as crack/alcohol babies. You saw the outcome; you failed to adequately question the etiology. Those babies now have a mental label in your memory, "crack babies", which you use to reason from. But the label itself is incorrect.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome has some very recognizable symptoms that have nothing to do with being born into poverty. A very specific skull shape for the worst cases, for one.
Crack babies not included in this study, the ones that are premature (20 something percent of crack user births fall into this category compared to 3-4% of births in general), also have very characteristic physical problems.
It is not poverty or malnutrition or stress that comes from poverty causing these very specific families of disorders. The crack kids are not coming from poor rural areas. They are coming from the inner city from crack using mothers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>This study did not include pre-term crack babies. It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study. Including pre-term babies makes analysis more complicated. >That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users. Do you have some basis for that conclusion? It sounds reasonable (if beside the point), but are we working off of the folklore or facts? >Crack or coc…
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.
>"The government advises that people should not regularly drink more than the daily unit guidelines of [...] and 2-3 units of alcohol for women (equivalent to a 13% ABV 175 ml glass of wine). ‘Regularly’ means drinking every day or most days of the week."
[175ml is about ¾ cup (USA) and the units above are about equivalent to a single pint of 4% beer]
FWIW If I have 2 glasses of wine I'll be "buzzed" because I don't drink every day. Take a month off from drinking, try two normal glasses (ie not pub measures) and you'll notice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>This study did not include pre-term crack babies. It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study. Including pre-term babies makes analysis more complicated. >That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users. Do you have some basis for that conclusion? It sounds reasonable (if beside the point), but are we working off of the folklore or facts? >Crack or coc…
Premature babies account for between 1/5 and 1/4 of all births to crack using mothers. If you decide to ignore those in your study because you want to study something specific then you should make it very, very clear. And anyone reporting on it should make it clear as well. It is like studying coal miners, but only the ones that work in the preparation plant on the surface.
>>Crack or cocaine is very, very bad for development. >Did you read the article? They concluded after a long and careful study that poverty had a much bigger effect than cocaine use.
Yes. For this particularly culled population.
>Did you know that the NY Times and others recently recanted much of their sensationalist reporting of the "Crack Epidemic"
I don't know how that is relevant. I am basing my position on personal experience working with these kids.
>No, it isn't. It means that people are reading and thinking instead of reacting to headlines and summaries.
Frankly, just the opposite. Many, many people in this thread, including yourself, are reacting to this particular headline and summary.
>>That means the broader population reading this article is likely to do the same thing. >What's your basis for that assumption?
Induction. It may be unfounded, but if relatively smart people make a bad leap of logic it is not unreasonable to imagine that less intelligent people will make the same mistake.
>efforts to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, and developmental defects in early childhood by combating drug-use were misguided; and going forward those efforts should be focused on learning about and mitigating whatever the effects of impoverishment are.
>efforts to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, and developmental defects in early childhood by combating drug-use were misguided;
No, they weren't. Cocaine use does lead to disabled children, statistically speaking. Many of whom are premature. This was a study has no information on the amount of cocaine used throughout pregnancy, only that the mothers and children tested positive at the time of full-term birth.
All we can conclude from this study is that poverty is worse for kids than cocaine exposure near the time of full-term birth. It has no information for the 1/4 to 1/5 of the kids that are born to people that test positive for cocaine that are born prematurely and tend to have much more severe health and developmental problems. Not to mention the ones that don't make it to birth at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This study did not include pre-term crack babies. It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study. Including pre-term babies makes analysis more complicated. >That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users. Do you have some basis for that conclusion? It sounds reasonable (if beside the point), but are we working off of the folklore or facts? >Crack or coc…
Crack can trigger premature labor, as noted in the study. The hypothesis here is that more crack increases the risk of premature labor. It's a hypothesis that might be worth investigating, and I would be surprised if there was no effect observed. As to the extent obviously I cannot say.
I don't disagree with that and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that such a study already exists.
>I would be surprised if there was no effect observed.
There are a lot of things that can cause premature labor. My personal opinion is that it is just as likely to be some stress otherwise related to their environment, or even stress related to the process of obtaining illegal drugs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
*When not taking into account prematurely born children, which among crack users is 17–27% compared to between 3-4% for the population at large.
How do we know it is caused by crack use and not by other factors that usually correlate with heavy crack use?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This study did not include pre-term crack babies. It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study. Including pre-term babies makes analysis more complicated. >That is a selection method that is going to skew heavily towards 'light' crack users. Do you have some basis for that conclusion? It sounds reasonable (if beside the point), but are we working off of the folklore or facts? >Crack or coc…
Crack can trigger premature labor, as noted in the study. The hypothesis here is that more crack increases the risk of premature labor. It's a hypothesis that might be worth investigating, and I would be surprised if there was no effect observed. As to the extent obviously I cannot say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Don't drink too much when pregnant. But, a short glass of wine once a week or so isn't excessive.
A glass of wine a _day_ wouldn't be excessive.