DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - Does Flouride Exposure Lower Intelligence In Children?

**FoetAgerhot46** · 08-05-2012, 01:07 AM

This study seems to think so.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/fea...jean-choi.html

It's an interesting paper. Shame there's a mountain of publication bias in such a topic. Given that so many of the publications were basically rehashings from the same Iranian and Chinese research groups, I am not sure the n was as high as this meta-analysis used for the calculations, which is what allowed them to get a statistical significance out of a mean difference of 0.45 IQ points. Speaking of... a standard deviation in IQ is 15 points... that is a REALLY small difference. In a psychology or psychiatry publication that number would basically be laughable. Finally, quite a few of the papers included in the meta-analysis used fluoride concentrations much higher than are normally used by US municipalities, and that were the result not of deliberate fluoridation of the water, but rather of fluorosis that was secondary to either poor transmission lines contaminated with groundwater fluoride, or industrial pollution... both of which are huge confounding variables.

Look, I can agree that perhaps adding fluoride to the water for everyone isn't necessarily the best idea. This is especially true considering that so many people are dependent on bottled water these days, and would not get the benefit of tap water fluoridation (there are a couple of interesting articles from the past few months demonstrating how this may have contributed to the dramatic resurgence of caries in very young kids). However, the obsession with fluoride highly reminds me of the vaccine debacle.

08-05-2012, 01:07 AM	#14
FoetAgerhot46 Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 417 Senior Member	This study seems to think so. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/fea...jean-choi.html It's an interesting paper. Shame there's a mountain of publication bias in such a topic. Given that so many of the publications were basically rehashings from the same Iranian and Chinese research groups, I am not sure the n was as high as this meta-analysis used for the calculations, which is what allowed them to get a statistical significance out of a mean difference of 0.45 IQ points. Speaking of... a standard deviation in IQ is 15 points... that is a REALLY small difference. In a psychology or psychiatry publication that number would basically be laughable. Finally, quite a few of the papers included in the meta-analysis used fluoride concentrations much higher than are normally used by US municipalities, and that were the result not of deliberate fluoridation of the water, but rather of fluorosis that was secondary to either poor transmission lines contaminated with groundwater fluoride, or industrial pollution... both of which are huge confounding variables. Look, I can agree that perhaps adding fluoride to the water for everyone isn't necessarily the best idea. This is especially true considering that so many people are dependent on bottled water these days, and would not get the benefit of tap water fluoridation (there are a couple of interesting articles from the past few months demonstrating how this may have contributed to the dramatic resurgence of caries in very young kids). However, the obsession with fluoride highly reminds me of the vaccine debacle.
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