Drinking one or two glasses of wine a week during pregnancy can have an impact on a child’s IQ, a study says.
Researchers from Oxford and Bristol universities looked at the IQ scores of 4,000 children as well as recording the alcohol intake of their mothers.
They found “moderate” alcohol intake of one to six units a week during pregnancy affected IQ.
Experts said the effect was small, but reinforced the need to avoid alcohol in pregnancy.
Repeat after me; “correlation is not the same thing as causation, correlation is not the same thing as causation…”
They call this claptrap science. The likes of Newton and Einstein will be churning in their graves.
How did we let the temperance movement take over?
Who funds such pointless research?
Ultimately, I suspect, we do.
“a causal effect could not be proven”
Funny that the BBC blithely rushed past that bit. 😉
You noticed that?
‘looked at the IQ scores of 4,000 children as well as recording the alcohol intake of their mothers.’
The educational establishment has, for decades, based educational policies on the orthodoxy that IQ is not hereditary – any thoughts in this context? I’ve seen enough at parents’ evenings to know what I think.
Meanwhile, if you’ll accept testimony from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, I found wine tasted quite appalling while I was pregnant – in fact, that’s how I first discovered that child no. 2 was on the way.
The doctor said it was a change in enzyme activity – the same thing that prompted cravings for bacon sandwiches even though I am by inclination a meat-hating vegetarian (I succumbed for the duration; haven’t eaten bacon since).
I’m told this is not at all uncommon and may well be genetic; perhaps, if they’ve really nothing better to do – and assuming we aren’t paying for it – they should be looking into exactly why the non-drinking mothers abstained.
How did they manage to gather the data? If the kids are old enough to have their IQs assessed the mums must have been pregnant years ago. Did all of them keep an accurate record of how much they had to drink at the time? In any case 4,000 must surely be far too small a sample to show a statistically significant signal among all the other possible variables. The obvious spoiler would be that intelligent parents would be more likely to abstain from drinking during pregnancy that less intelligent ones, was this factor controlled for?
I can imagine the reaction this ‘science’ will get from the French medical establishment; and rightly so.
They’ll never let up. I need a wine or eight.
When I heard this today I wondered how much drinking ‘affected IQ’ exactly.
I have not bothered to look for an answer, but I have a feeling that it is probably statically insignificant and a similar causation (not correlation) could be discerned from mothers who dye their hair, wear pink trousers or live near power-lines (insert equally daft proposal here)
MAY affect on a small sample.
Yeah.
Given that alchohol is a solvent, I would have thought that SMALL quantities would help, improving transfer across the placenta….