[lbo-talk] pesticides are bad for kids

Eric Romsted eromsted at verizon.net
Mon May 17 10:06:30 PDT 2010


The original journal article is available free online: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-3058v1

The authors say they examined several "confounding" factors but that these did not explain the correlation:

"There was a 55% to 72% increase in the odds of ADHD for a 10-fold increase in DMAP concentration, depending on the criteria used for case identification. This association was not explained by gender, age, PIR, race/ethnicity, fasting duration, or creatinine concentration."

PIR is short for poverty/income ratio, their metric of socio-economic status.

On 5/17/10 12:14 PM, "Andy" <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It is quite possible that people  who are more likely to be diagnosed with
>> ADHD (mostly lower socio economic strata) also are more likely to be exposed
>> to pesticides (as they cannot afford more expensive organic food,)  which
>> may produce statistical correlations but not necessarily causality.
>
> Do you think it's likely they haven't taken that into account? I've
> gotten accustomed finding out that the authors and/or reviewers think
> of these things, too.



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