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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

#181

Post by foobarbazqux »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #177
foobarbazqux wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's a hypothesis that might be worth investigating, 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 obtain…

My guess is that if we controlled for environmental and purchasing stress, more crack use alone would lead to more stress, possibly in a dramatic way depending on the levels.

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

#182

Post by foobarbazqux »

clavalle wrote: post #179
foobarbazqux wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But premature crack-babies have health problems beyond being merely premature.

Yes, a related hypothesis is that more crack results in more health problems for a baby. If both are true, then by excluding pre-term babies you are excluding the ones with the most serious health problems.

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

#183

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rtpg wrote: post #12
bittired wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn lies and statistics, though. Being poor does not cause lower IQ, nor does lower IQ cause you to be poor. However, you'll find a lot of lower IQ people at poverty level. You can't guarantee that any college candidate that is poor is not going to excel, so poverty, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, should have absolutely nothing to do with acceptance into any organization, assuming that everything else is e…

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.

Can't agree more with your first sentence and it's very depressing.

Relatives purchased tickets for a show for me and my son to go to featuring fighting robots. He was extremely stimulated by it, not surprisingly, and I so want to capture that enthusiasm towards some engineering (make a robot).

Without the wealthier relatives that stimulation wouldn't have been there. Without wealthier parents he's not going to (in short term at least) have access to resources to develop towards the potential educational outcomes from that experience.

Taking a world view we must be in the top reaches of wealth too I'd imagine. Sad.

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

#184

Post by polymatter »

dalke wrote: post #160
raverbashing wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, that's the recommendation But about this I'm not so sure: "most women also stop drinking alcohol when they discover that they are pregnant."

Just like I and others are "not so sure" about your original statement. Again I ask, how well can you claim to speak for the entirety of Europe? My observation is that Nordic women abstain from drinking during pregnancy at least as often as women who are native born to the US. What would you accept as evidence that your original statement is incorrect? Perhaps the journal article "Alcohol consumption among pregnant w…

I agree with your broad argument, but it isn't clear to me if you are referencing actual studies. If you are, please at least state how you are finding them and/or the journals in which they are published so that others can do so too.

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

#185

Post by chrischen »

yusefnapora wrote: post #166
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…

IQ most likely has a genetic factor to it. Otherwise, evolution would be independent of IQ and our society would not have shown an increase in IQ over time (which studies have shown to be true). So no, I did not misread the article.

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

#186

Post by bjourne »

raverbashing wrote: post #97
dalke wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really speak with such authority about all of Europe? In Sweden, where I live, alcohol and pregnancy are not suppose to mix. For example, translating from http://www.vardguiden.se/Tema/Gravid/Livsstilsfragor/Alkohol... : "Since no one knows where the border lies, the recommendations in Sweden and many other countries are to not drink alcohol at all during pregnancy." Or translating from http://www.lakartidnin…

You're right, that's the recommendation But about this I'm not so sure: "most women also stop drinking alcohol when they discover that they are pregnant."

You're just wrong. Of the Swedish mothers I know, they all stopped drinking when they became aware of their pregnancy. Any mother who didn't would be seen as a skank and probably would even be denied wine if she ordered it at restaurants. The general sentiment is that drinking/smoking/drugging pregnant women are trash.

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

#187

Post by chrischen »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #158
chrischen wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they don't test vocab or math in an IQ test. I think you're thinking of the modern day SATs, which can be affected by poverty.

Nope. By "math" I was referring to number sequences (which number comes next...), as opposed to geometric patterns (which shape comes next...); by "vocab" I was referring to analogical questions (a is to b as c is to __). If SATs are readily accepted to be affected by poverty, I fail to understand why IQ tests wouldn't be also.

Because IQ tests are administered across races, cultures, languages, education levels, and even age, and are normalized across these factors.

Obviously for vocab, a Chinese person would fail if they don't understand English, so they'd translate it. For a poor American, the vocab skills required on an IQ test are pretty basic.

Also, the modern SAT tests are stated by CollegeBoard[1] to NOT correlate to IQ anymore. They correlate to education.

You're conflating a test for knowledge vs a test for cognitive ability.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/view...

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

#188

Post by foobarbazqux »

polymatter wrote: post #184
dalke wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like I and others are "not so sure" about your original statement. Again I ask, how well can you claim to speak for the entirety of Europe? My observation is that Nordic women abstain from drinking during pregnancy at least as often as women who are native born to the US. What would you accept as evidence that your original statement is incorrect? Perhaps the journal article "Alcohol consumption among pregnant w…

I agree with your broad argument, but it isn't clear to me if you are referencing actual studies. If you are, please at least state how you are finding them and/or the journals in which they are published so that others can do so too.

They're article titles, Google finds them easily.

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

#189

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

clavalle wrote: post #176
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #136

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…

>>This study did not include pre-term crack babies. >It is entirely reasonable to select only full-term babies for the study. 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…

>If you decide to ignore those in your study because you want to study something specific then you should make it very, very clear.

There are a lot of things researchers want. They write grant proposals to study things which they can, at the beginning of the study demonstrate the possibility of obtaining a useful unambiguous conclusion. I don't get the impression that the researchers misrepresented their study. Is that what you're alleging?

>>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.

Does your personal experience involve having read news articles like the one we're discussing, or watching television news covering the subject?

>>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,

If you have finite resources n to spend fixing problem p and you have been using solution x which after some time appears to have negligible effect, would you continue x, or consider looking for another solution?

>No, they weren't. Cocaine use does lead to disabled children, statistically speaking.

Where are the statistics? The news article is reporting a study that does not, or only barely supports that conclusion, suggesting that the Cocaine use may be merely incidental, and not causal.

>Many of whom are premature.

From the article:

  >Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems.
>This was a study has no information on the amount of cocaine used throughout pregnancy,

Is it even possible to conduct such a study? It would likely require clinicians to closely supervise pregnant women while the women were using illegal drugs.

>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.

What is your hypothesis for how the effects of poverty would be negated for the cohort/time period you're interested in?

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

#190

Post by cwp »

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…

Perhaps... but as a society, we also love to freak out about danger to children. The younger the child and the less-well-defined the risk, the better. FAS presses all the right buttons.
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